Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of (a) the number of officials in his Department involved in recording retained EU legislation for the purposes of the Retained EU Law Dashboard in the latest period for which figures are available and (b) the cost to the public purse of recording that information.

Defra has a large body of Retained EU Law (REUL). To ensure as much of this as possible was captured, a central coordinating function was responsible for ensuring completion of the Cabinet Office commission. In addition, numerous officials from across Defra were involved in producing and contributing information for inclusion in the dashboard. This work was carried out as part of officials’ normal business activities, and we did not record the amount of staff time spent specifically on this work.

Since it has not been possible to make an accurate estimate of staff time, we cannot give an accurate estimate of costs. All costs associated with data collection were met as part of Defra’s normal administrative budgets.

There has been no additional non-pay cost to the public purse by creating the dashboard. The process was led by the Cabinet Office, who commissioned Government Departments to find REUL within their legislation and compile an authoritative account of where REUL sits on the UK statute book.

The dashboard itself is made by the Government Strategic Management Office and is hosted on Tableau Public, which is a free platform for hosting public dashboards. The dashboard will continue to be updated at no additional cost.