Departmental Postal Services

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what percentage of postal services for his Department and its agencies were provided by (a) Royal Mail and (b) other postal service providers (i) in 2007, (ii) in 2008, (iii) between 1 January 2009 and 1 July 2009 and (iv) after 1 July 2009. (298805)

The Ministry of Justice currently has no formal contracts for mail services. However, it has a number of local agreements with both Royal Mail and DX Ltd. We recognise that the absence of established contracts is not satisfactory and are in the process of completing a further competition against the Buying Solutions Postal Framework. It is expected that we will have a formal contract in place by January 2010.

Both Royal Mail and DX Ltd. provide postal and courier services to the Ministry of Justice and due to the structure of financial operating systems used it is not possible to separate expenditure for postal services.

Once formal contracts are established the Ministry of Justice will be able to begin compiling data on the provision of postal services.