Departmental Travel

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how much his Department spent on travel (a) within and (b) outside the UK for officials in each of the last 10 years; and what percentage of his Department's overall expenditure was spent on such travel in each such year. (181639)

Information in the format requested is available only from April 2003 and is provided in the following table.

	Overseas (£) (including EU)	Domestic (£)	Total (£)	Total as percentage of DWP overall DEL expenditure
April 2003 to March 2004	753,218	29,399,320	30,152,538	0.491
April 2004 to March 2005	1,018,150	29,654,766	30,672,916	0.477
April 2005 to March 2006	1,195,396	31,435,816	32,631,212	0.528
April 2006 to March 2007	742,112	29,458,446	30,200,558	0.500
April 2007 to October 2007	466,289	18,181,514	18,647,803	¹—
¹DEL expenditure for 2007-08 financial year will be available following publication of the Department's Resource Accounts later this year.

All official travel is undertaken in accordance with rules set out in departmental guidance.

Volume 472: debated on Tuesday 26 February 2008