Dear Ministry for the Environment,

Please provide information on whether you have used contractors, consultants or other providers of services to fill gaps you have from accepting voluntary redundancy in the last six months. I am interested in both short term filling of gaps and long term filling of skill gaps and why redundancy would be used and then services being bought in.

With this, please detail
- The business unit and job area being filled.
- The case / argument for using a supplier to fill a gap where redundancy was accepted.
- The cost of this supplier providing this resource (or additional service).
- The approval endorsing this decision, given redundancy was given.
- If possible, the total cost of providing this service above the standard cost (such as the cost of payout plus the increase in cost through using a consultant).

For completeness, I am interested and think this is in the public interest as voluntary redundancy would imply that services are no longer needed, but then if money is being used to give work to consultants then I am interested in understanding how this is best use of taxpayer funds.

Please note I have asked various agencies who have announced the use of voluntary redundancies this question.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Finley