Departments: Public Relations

Grant Shapps
To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how much was spent by his Department on public relations in each of the last five years.

Alan Johnson
The Department employs public relations agencies for specific communications tasks, most commonly working alongside our press office to provide campaign support in local regional and specialist media. The amount spent on such activities in each of the last five years has totalled significantly less than 0.01 per cent. of total departmental spend and is as follows:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                                                                                                                        |Cost1 (£)|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|2002-03                                                                                                                 |567,987  |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|2003-04                                                                                                                 |1,105,207|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|2004-05                                                                                                                 |1,593,317|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|2005-06                                                                                                                 |914,163  |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|2006-07                                                                                                                 |1,630,935|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|1 These figures include contracts placed by the Department and by the Central Office of Information (COI) on our behalf.|         |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In 2006-07 the spend has covered:

Work on the London Challenge including the ‘London Schools Celebrating Achievement’ campaign.

Promoting a wider awareness of foundation degrees among learners, while also helping employers to understand the benefits of these qualifications to their businesses.

Student Finance—a key objective of our activity in 2006-07 was to ensure that 16 to 19- year-olds and their parents were aware of, and understood, the new student support arrangements. This was important to help ensure that finance was not seen as a barrier to participating in HE.