Ongoing delivery and maintenance of the Department's website is carried out by the Department's own in-house Digital Media team. It is not possible for us to extract and quantify internal staff costs, because in most cases, staff are engaged in more than one role. In addition, we are unable to establish accurately our annual running costs because they form part of a wider departmental IT contract.
We can provide a figure for 2008-09 development work, as we redeveloped the Department's website in that year. This is a one-off cost relating to that development only and is not an annual cost. This is £215,666.00.
The total forecast expenditure for Directgov in the 2009-10 financial year is £30,500,000. This is consistent with previously agreed financial figures and covers all aspects of Directgov business of which an aspect is website maintenance.
It is not possible to provide 2009-10 forecast costs for the remaining websites within the responsibility of the Department. We are working with Cabinet Office to implement a standardised method for quantifying website costs across Government in line with Central Office of Information guidelines. This is in response to a Public Accounts Committee recommendation. These costs will be available from April 2010 onwards as per the timetable.