The Department does not hold a central record of the number of (a) consultants and (b) agency staff deployed, and to assemble the requested details from individual contract records would incur disproportionate cost.
The Home Department engages consultancy firms to support and augment civil servants in the delivery of a specific range of work, including large IT development programmes and, where more cost effective, longer term service delivery programmes.
The Department’s expenditure on these services is allocated across a wide range of firms, from small, specialist companies with niche expertise and few employees, to global multinational organizations offering a broad spectrum and substantial depth of consultancy expertise.
The Department awards contracts in competition according to the EU Procurement Directives based on value for money. The Department uses OGC framework agreements where appropriate. The use of external consultants provides the Department with specialist knowledge, skill, capacity and technical expertise that would not otherwise be available. Some expenditure is on consultants to whom we have outsourced services, such as IT.
Expenditure on (a) consultants in the financial years (i) 2004-05, (ii) 2005-06 and (iii) 2006-07 is as follows:
Financial year HO headquarters IPS CRB Total spend 2004-05 55,991,869 4,486,183 729,000 61 ,207,052 2005-06 128,000,000 10,912,741 50,462 138,963,203 2006-07 118,000,000 29,870,522 144,235 148,014,757
The Home Department uses a variety of externally resourced staff to fill roles in the Department that cannot readily be filled by permanent staff. The figures given are drawn from our financial reporting systems and represent various categories of agency and other externally resourced staff, but exclude consultancy services.
Expenditure on (b) agency staff in the financial years (i) 2004-05, (ii) 2005-06 and (iii) 2006-07 is as follows:
Financial year HO headquarters IPS CRB Total spend 2004-05 37,000,000 5,626,207 703,756 43,329,963 2005-06 38,000,000 7,746,589 354,756 46,101,345 2006-07 40,000,000 26,612,732 301 ,998 66,914,730