According to the definition provided by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), temporary staff include all interim managers, specialist contractors, administrative, manual and clerical staff. Personnel who are engaged to provide advisory services are excluded as the OGC classifies them as "consultancy". It is often the case that the same suppliers provide temporary staff and consultants.
On its formation on 9 May 2007 as a merger between the former Department for Constitutional Affairs and parts of the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice inherited a range of local procurement arrangements which were brought together within a single departmental wide function from April 2009. It is not possible therefore to identify expenditure on temporary staff classified according to OGC definitions from procurement data prior to the current financial year. To provide this information would incur the disproportionate cost of scrutinising thousands of invoices from relevant suppliers to determine what costs relate to consultancy and what costs relate to temporary staff.
The new departmental wide arrangements are based on the best practice processes that were already in operation on the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) agency. NOMS is therefore able to identify £27.25 million expenditure in 2008-09 with its contracted Administrative and Clerical Agency Staff providers at that time (Brook Street; Hays; Reed; Employment Plus; Kelly Services; NRG and Office Angels).
In most cases, the Ministry now utilises the OGC Buying Solutions framework arrangements for the provision of temporary staff. The suppliers under this framework can be found at the following link under the categories of (1) Temporary Clerical and Admin (2) Specialist Contractors (3) Interim Management:
http://www.buyingsolutions.gov.uk/frameworks/full.html
Using a slightly different definition for headcount monitoring purposes, the departmental annual resource accounts identify agency and contract staff costs and numbers within notes (9a) and (9c) in the column headed "others". However, these figures include some staff on temporary contracts who are employed directly by the Ministry of Justice, hence the pension and social security costs disclosed within the total expenditure. The figures also include the Scotland Office and Wales Office. It would incur disproportionate costs to identify the specific costs and numbers associated with staff employed through agencies rather than directly employed. The accounts can be found at the following links for 2008-09 and 2007-08 respectively:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/resource-accounts-2008-09.htm
http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/1055.htm
As part of its Performance Efficiency Programme, the Ministry of Justice has controls in place to restrict and reduce the number of agency and contract staff employed. In some circumstances, however, the employment of temporary personnel is unavoidable, for example to secure specialist skills for specific time-limited projects or to cover for absences such as maternity leave.