Written question WQ82780

The running costs for the overseas offices for financial years 2020-21 and 2019-20 are detailed in Table 1 below. Previous years can be found in the published State of the Estate report.

The UK Government does not charge for partial year occupancy and operates on a deferred basis, charging only for the previous full financial year; therefore our most recently opened offices (Doha and Düsseldorf) have not incurred costs to date. Charges for these offices will be incurred from this financial year onwards.

Due to the size of the offices, details of salary costs and expenses have not been provided as data protection legislation requires the protection of personal information. Disclosure of staff costs for each office is likely to allow the actual salaries of individual staff to be identified.

Table 2 provides details of the headcount for the last five years. These figures do not include secondees or maternity cover.

Attracting inward investment is a collective effort. Our overseas network works in collaboration with Wales-based staff to identify new inward investment leads and provide a holistic approach to relationship management by working with the global headquarters of companies that are based in Wales. They undertake a range of relationship building, information gathering and profile raising activity with governments, universities, sporting and cultural organisations and businesses alike. Due to the length of time and the number of people involved in an inward investment project, it is not possible to attribute the success of an individual project to the intervention of a single part of the Welsh Government.

Table 1:

Table 2: