Emily Thornberry – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Emily Thornberry on 2016-02-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how much his Department spent on recruitment agency fees in each of the last six years.

Mark Lancaster

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has made payments to recruitment agencies in the last six years as follows:

This expenditure relates to recruitment to the permanent Senior Civil Service across the MOD, including the Trading Funds. It represents the costs of searches, advertisements, response handling, assessment and support to selection panels. The figures do not include expenditure on Contingent Labour, the process used to engage temporary staff through recruitment agency contracts.

Generally, recruitment to the MOD for all grades below the Senior Civil Service is carried out by Defence Business Services who do not make use of external recruitment agencies when appointing MOD Crown Servants. This is not the case in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), which is now a bespoke trading entity. Since 2013, DE&S has made use of agency support in recruiting staff in order to ensure it has access to suitably qualified and experienced personnel to fill specialist vacancies. DE&S expenditure is as follows: