Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 8 January 2018 to Question 120491, on Prisons: Expenditure, what estimate his Department has made of the cost of answering the Question.

The requested information is not recorded centrally as this is not a business requirement nor is it required under any accounting regulation. However, as suggested in my previous answer, our published prison unit cost data, where web details were enclosed, provides resource cost figures for previous years. Within the data, the most recent cost information contains restated figures to enable a more fair comparison between the two years.

In respect of cost related to collate the information requested, we would need carry out a revaluation pricing exercise for all prisons for each year since 2010 to provide any accurate comparable data. This would exceed the Department’s cost limit of £850 for answering a parliamentary question. We estimate a minimum cost of around £3,000 to create and collate this information separately.