Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much his Department spent on external recruitment consultants in the (a) 2020-21, (b) 2021-22 and (c) 2022-23 financial year.

Due to the financial and reporting systems in the department it is not currently possible to separate out spend associated with external recruitment consultancy services from all other consultancy spend for the majority of departmental recruitment.

However, we are able to provide the following figures, which apply to Senior Civil Service Recruitment only. To note, this does not include digital recruitment.

2020/21: £190,627.84

2021/22: £211,054.00

2022/23 (Mar22 to Feb23) : £171,608.46

These figures represent executive search activity spend on SCS (Deputy Director – Director General) recruitment for non-digital roles across these years.