Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much the Food Standards Agency has spent on equipment to enable staff to work from home in each of the last three years.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has a long-established contractual flexible working offer known as Our Ways of Working (OWOW). The 2013 Civil Service Reform project, The Way We Work, required Government organisations to adopt Smarter Working by 2022, leading the FSA to introduce OWOW in 2016. In the past three years, the FSA has spent the following on equipment to enable staff to work from home:

- £54,394 in 2024/25;

- £60,794 in 2023/24; and

- £73,250 in 2022/23.

OWOW supports the Government’s Places for Growth programme by recruiting based on merit, not location. This increases opportunities in regions and nations, and has enabled the FSA to reduce the square meterage of its estate by 50%.