Departmental Consultants

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how much consultants employed by his Department and its agencies have been paid (a) in total and (b) in reimbursable expenses in each of the last 10 years. (313992)

The information is as follows:

(a) DEFRA has reported its use of consultants in its annual departmental reports.

*£ million*
	Area
Departmental reports	Management and business consultancy	Specialist consultancy
2002-03	15	40
2003-04	20	40
2004-05	79	36
2005-06	44	37
2006-07	29	54
Note: The figures were derived on identifying the spend with particular external suppliers and placing all that spend under one of the areas shown in the table. It was recognised that this does lead to some inaccuracies as spend with a supplier may be across more than one expenditure area. But at the time, this was the only method available.

Refined processes were introduced in 2007-08, which allowed DEFRA to be more specific in the 2009 departmental report (for fiscal year 2007-08) with more accurate figures for Professional Services Consultancy. This is based on the extensive use of improved procurement category codes, a process which OGC adopted for the first Public Sector Procurement Expenditure Survey in October 2008 using their own version of category codes and to which we needed to map our category codes.

*PSPES reports*¹
	£ million
2007-08	37
2008-09	35
2009-10 (Ap-No. only)	²23
¹ PSPES—Annual Public Sector Procurement Expenditure Survey. ² To be validated for next PSPES.

(b) Information on reimbursable expenses could be provided only at disproportionate cost.

Volume 506: debated on Monday 22 February 2010