§ Mr. David Howellasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he will publish his estimates of the costs in the current year of carrying out each of the functions of his Department, as listed in paragraph 34 of the Centre for Administrative Studies Occasional Paper No. 4, published by Her Majesty's Treasury.
§ Mr. CallaghanA feasibility study on the application of output budgeting to the Home Office made it clear that it would not be appropriate, at this stage, to embark on the considerable work234W which would be involved in an attempt to apply the technique to all Home Office functions. But I am anxious to see the technique applied to some Home Office functions, and as a first step I have arranged for an experiment to be conducted in programme budgeting in the police service.