(2) with reference to the answer to the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar of 25 February 2008, Official Report, column 1184W, on civil servants: vacancies, what criteria are used to decide whether a vacancy is advertised on the public part of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway or on the staff-only section;
(3) with reference to the answer to the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar of 25 February 2008, Official Report, column 1184W, on civil servants: vacancies, whether an equality impact assessment has been made of the criteria used to decide whether a vacancy is advertised on the public part of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway or the staff-only section;
(4) what procedures govern the advertisement of vacancies by (a) Government Departments, (b) Executive agencies and (c) non-departmental public bodies on the (i) publicly accessible and (ii) internal parts of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway;
(5) what the Civil Service policy is on advertising Civil Service vacancies on the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway;
(6) pursuant to the answer of 14 January 2009, Official Report, column 202, on public information, what progress has been made on improving access to vacancies for Civil Service jobs;
(7) with reference to the answer to the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar of 25 February 2008, Official Report, column 1184W, on civil servants: vacancies, how many of the jobs advertised on the staff-only part of the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway were subsequently advertised on the public part of the site.
There is no policy requirement for Government Departments and Executive agencies to advertise their vacancies on the Recruitment Gateway. However, the expectation is that all civil service jobs should be advertised on the Gateway.
Government Departments and Executive agencies have delegated responsibility for recruitment advertising. Each Department determines its own policies on where they advertise their vacancies and have responsibility for assessing the equality impact of those policies.
Civil service vacancies are advertised internally first to surplus staff facing redundancy, in line with the “Protocol on Handling Surplus Staff”, which came into effect on 1 April 2008. The civil service redeployment policy is comparable to the policies of other companies and organisations in handling surplus staff.
The Civil Service Recruitment Gateway has published a total of 8,456 vacancies in the past 12 months, of which, 4,474 were advertised to the general public and 3,982 within the civil service. Providing answers to the specific queries relating to each post and whether internal vacancies were subsequently advertised to the public can be provided only at disproportionate cost.
On 25 February a new Jobs Online site went live in Beta, which replaces the former Recruitment Gateway. This provides for external civil service jobs to be available in the one place and in a single format, easily accessible to jobseekers. As we develop the site, other organisations will all be able to link to the site and jobseekers will be able to quickly find individual jobs using search engines.