To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what estimate has been made of the proportion of personal computers in each of his Department’s offices that are turned off (a) overnight, (b) at weekends and (c) during holiday periods; and if he will make a statement. (269597)

DEFRA is nearing completion of a programme to roll-out new Energy Star compliant Vista laptops and desktops to its staff in core DEFRA and those agencies/NDPBs taking all their desktop services from IBM (including Animal Health, Natural England and Marine and Fisheries Agency), a total of some 7,000 staff.

These new devices deploy Vista’s inbuilt group policy options to enforce a default switch to the Vista ‘sleep’ (which drops the device to a low power setting) and then ‘hibernate’ standby modes (which encrypts the data and then switches off the machine) after pre-set periods of inactivity.

On completion of this roll-out in the summer, all devices in these DEFRA organisations will therefore be switched off overnight, at weekends and over holiday periods.

No central information is currently available as to the position with DEFRA’s other agencies and NDPBs.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many (a) printers and (b) multi-function devices with printing functions were in use in each division of his Department in each of the last five years; how many such devices had a function enabling two-sided printing; and if he will make a statement. (269610)

There are no figures available for the Department for the period 2004 to 2006.

In 2007 a printer consolidation exercise was undertaken for the core Department and those of its agencies taking desktop services from the Department’s strategic supplier IBM (some 4,500 staff). As a result:

2,044 printers were removed for disposal

601 multi-function devices were installed with duplex settings

749 existing printers with duplex and standby power modes were redeployed.

Total printers deployed: 1,350—all enabled with duplex printing.

As these printers are all shared over the network there is no breakdown available by division; nor are figures available yet for 2008.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many and what proportion of IT products in each category procured for each division of his Department were compliant with the Government’s Buy Sustainable-Quick Win standard in the latest year for which figures are available; and if he will make a statement. (269632)

For core DEFRA and those agencies taking all their IT services from IBM, (some 4,500 staff), IBM currently uses a catalogue of assets that conform with the Quick Wins criteria for those product sectors where these are now in place i.e. laptops, desktops and monitors.

96 per cent. of the currently deployed 4,500 IBM desktop and laptop assets are compliant with Quick Wins, following completion of a recent refresh exercise that provided a single device for all these staff.