Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much his Department has spent on interior decoration since May 2010.

The Department does not directly pay a specific amount for interior decoration. EMCOR, the Department’s facilities services provider, holds a contract which includes the routine annual interior decoration of Departmental buildings within a larger fixed price cost.

The budget for interior decoration within this contract is £246,000 calculated pro rata for the period 2010 to 2015, within the overall fixed price costs of the EMCOR contract. This covers the decoration in the six buildings that it has owned or occupied since May 2010.