Jonathan Ashworth – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jonathan Ashworth on 2016-02-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, how much his Department has paid to staff in overtime in each of the last 24 months.
Mr Edward Vaizey
Sums paid to Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) staff for overtime for the last 24 months, for which figures are available, were as follows:
|
£000s |
January |
February |
March |
April |
May |
June |
July |
August |
September |
October |
November |
December |
|
2014 |
– |
5.1 |
10.9 |
2.6 |
6.8 |
4.3 |
7.3 |
23.7 |
7.0 |
7.1 |
3.7 |
10.8 |
|
2015 |
2.2 |
3.9 |
28.0 |
6.2 |
31.0 |
5.8 |
4.3 |
8.3 |
6.6 |
4.3 |
8.6 |
7.1 |
|
2016 |
6.3 |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
– |
DCMS is the smallest government department, with 509 full time equivalent (FTE) permanent employees (as of 31 January 2016). Overtime is a cost-effective way of managing peaks in workload in order to reduce the need for contractors or adding to the department’s headcount. Annual expenditure on overtime accounts for just under 0.3% of the DCMS paybill.
DCMS has responsibility for high profile policy, which includes staging national First World War commemoration events – this is reflected in our overtime figures for August 2014 and May 2015.
Recent machinery of government changes has also seen DCMS take on additional policy areas, including the digital economy unit, digital inclusion, data protection, the sponsorship of the National Archives and the Information Commissioner. The figure for March 2015 reflects the addition of the 2014-15 total overtime cost for the Digital Economy Unit following its Machinery of Government transfer to DCMS; monthly analysis of this sum is not available.
