To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what the total cost of his Department's website was in the last 12 months; and how many hits it received in the same period. [104203]

The estimated total cost of the DfT website (www.dft.gov.uk) from 1 June 2002 to 31 March 2003 is £752,000. This includes staff costs, development and HTML conversion costs. It also includes the capital costs of developing a new website, which aims to provide my Department with an improved more customer-focused website in terms of design, navigation and information retrieval. The new website, which is under development, accounts for 70 per cent. of total costs.DfT did not exist as a separate department for the period March-May 2002. Calculation of an accurate transport percentage of costs for that period could be done only at disproportionate cost.During the period 1 July (when statistics were first available for the DfT website) to 19 March 2003 the total number of page impressions (used as a measure of 'hits') was 13,352,742.