HC Deb 25 March 2003 vol 402 c119W
Mr. Bercow

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what the total cost of his Department's website was in the last 12 months; and how many hits it received in the same period. [104203]

Mr. Jamieson

The estimated total cost of the DfT website (www.dft.gov.uk) from 1 June 2002 to 31 March 2003 is £752,000. This includes staff costs, development and HTML conversion costs. It also includes the capital costs of developing a new website, which aims to provide my Department with an improved more customer-focused website in terms of design, navigation and information retrieval. The new website, which is under development, accounts for 70 per cent. of total costs.

DfT did not exist as a separate department for the period March-May 2002. Calculation of an accurate transport percentage of costs for that period could be done only at disproportionate cost.

During the period 1 July (when statistics were first available for the DfT website) to 19 March 2003 the total number of page impressions (used as a measure of 'hits') was 13,352,742.