To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many staff took paternity leave from his Department in each of the last five years; and what the average duration of such leave was. (290251)

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) allows new fathers to take up to 10 working days paternity leave providing they meet the qualifying criteria including continuous employment for at least 26 weeks.

Information from 2006-07 to present is shown in the following table but it should be noted the data are recorded using calendar days and cannot be converted to working days. Earlier figures were not held centrally.

The information requested for the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) is not held centrally and to obtain it would entail manually examining large numbers of individual files at a disproportionate cost.