Tom Pursglove – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tom Pursglove on 2015-10-27.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many civil servants of her Department are members of trades unions; how many working hours of facility time are taken by such civil servants; and what estimate she has made of the cost of that facility time to her Department.

Karen Bradley

Trade union membership is a matter between the individual member and their trade union. We do not hold current details of the number of staff within the Home Office who subscribe to a trade union.

We provide quarterly returns to the Cabinet Office on the number of staff who are trade union representatives and who take paid facility time and the associated cost to the Department. These are then published as transparency data on Gov.uk. The last published data, covering the quarter from 1 October 2014 to 31 December 2014, shows that the cost to the Department of facility time for 334 union representatives was 0.08% of the total paybill, which is within the Cabinet Office guideline of 0.1% of paybill.