Social Security Advisory Committee

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions pursuant to the answer of 8 March 2010, Official Report, column 78W, on Social Security Advisory Committee: finance, how much the Social Security Advisory Committee spent (a) in total, (b) on staffing costs and (c) on running costs in (i) 2005-06, (ii) 2006-07, (iii) 2007-08, and (iv) 2008-09; and how much expenditure she expects that Committee to incur on each type of cost in 2009-10. (322054)

The information is in the following table:

£
	2005-06	2006-07	2007-08	2008-09	2009-10¹
Total spend	331,700	396,900	390,700	457,900	456,200
Staffing costs	232,600	311,600	278,900	257,500	289,600
Non-staffing costs	99,100	85,300	111,800	200,400	166,600
¹ Estimate. Notes: 1. All figures rounded to the nearest £100. 2. The SSAC is the UK advisory body on social security and related matters, such as links with the labour market and wider social welfare issues. It performs a mandatory scrutiny of most proposals for making the regulations on those issues. Thus, much of the Department for Work and Pensions’ policy and legislative proposals—including the progressing of the welfare reform agenda—comes before the Committee. 3. The significant increase in non-staffing costs in 2008-09 mainly reflects the Committee’s decision, in the light of rising workloads, to deploy Members and external researchers more intensively to augment the work carried out by the SSAC Secretariat in that year. It also reflects the Committee’s costs in undertaking a public appointment exercise in 2008-09; no such exercise took place in the previous year.

Volume 507: debated on Tuesday 16 March 2010