Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether requests for consultancy and temporary staff for the his Department must be accompanied by a formal business case.

The Department has procedures in place to comply with Cabinet Office Efficiency controls ensuring that all requests for consultancy or temporary staff are subject to approval by formal panels. These panels provide the ultimate approval based upon business case submissions.

We do not recognise the term ‘resource board’, however, the process for approving professional services spend is via a professional services business case (PSBC) that gets approved by the Finance Approvals Panel (FAP). Temporary staff are approved via one of two routes:

- Specialist Contractors = PSBC to secretariat then FAP

- Admin and Clerical = complete a ‘Request to Recruit’ Form (which is a proportionate type of business case) which is then submitted via a secretariat.

With regard to the question on rates, the Department does hold this information on its electronic procurement system from which the proportion of consultants on daily rates could be calculated, however, this would require a review of each individual contract to check the payment method, and would result in disproportionate cost. We are not therefore able to provide this information.