Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 13 February 2018 to Question 126505, on Probation Hostels, what estimate his Department has made of the cost of answering that question.

For the first three months of 2010, provision of Approved Premises (AP), formerly known as Probation hostels, was the responsibility of local Probation Boards, a number of charitable trusts and a small number of Probation Trusts. From 1 April 2010 until 31 May 2014, AP were provided by the 35 Probation Trusts and a number of charitable trusts. To establish whether the Ministry of Justice retains the requested information relating to this earlier period and, if so, to locate, retrieve, extract, collate and process it, would involve a detailed search of an extensive range of archived material, which would be extremely labour-intensive. Providing the information sought in this Question would therefore involve costs of not less than £10,000.