Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 14 February 2018 to Question 126793, on Ministry of Justice: consultants, what estimate his Department made of the cost of providing the information sought.

Your original request was for data spanning a 10 year period. We do not hold all of the information centrally and some of the requested information is published in our annual accounts.

To provide the detail requested in PQ 126793 we would initially have to determine if the information requested is held, which would entail contacting all departments across MoJ and its ALB's to retrieve any electronic or manually archived documents. All information would have to be collated and, where possible, matched to details drawn from current and historic spend files.

Due to the time span of the request and the various data sources, spend files and systems that would need to be accessed, the time required to complete this exercise would exceed the Department’s cost limit, £850, for answering parliamentary questions. In this specific instance we have estimated that it would cost a minimum of £2100 to collect, collate and review the information needed to respond.