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Departmental Consultations

Volume 467: debated on Wednesday 14 November 2007

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development how many consultants his Department employed in each of the last five years; and what this figure is as a percentage of the staff employed by the Department in each of those years. (162625)

The number of consultants engaged centrally by DFID in each of the last five years is shown in the following table. This includes both self-employed individuals and contracts with companies under which significant numbers of people are utilised.

Financial year

Number of consultants

2002-03

407

2003-04

349

2004-05

310

2005-06

336

2006-07

273

The majority of consultants are engaged by DFID on behalf of development partners to help them deliver long-term development projects to help reduce poverty. Overall comparison between the number of individual consultants allocated to DFID's work for limited periods of time and DFID's overall staffing complement could not be established without incurring disproportionate cost.