§ Lord Killearnasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why a Lords Paper of three paragraphs, on one side of one sheet of paper, is priced at 35p (No. 200 of 1981–82); why a Treasury Minute of 19 paragraphs printed for the Stationery Office by an outside printer on four sides out of a total of eight (i.e. four sheets) is priced at £1.25 (Cmnd. 8620); and whether Her Majesty's Government will put in hand a thorough investigation into the printing costs of all Parliamentary and Government publications, on the lines of the recent inquiry by the European Parliament into the printing costs of Community Institutions (Working Document 1-452/82), as a result of which remarkable economies are proposed.
§ Lord CockfieldThe pricing policy for Her Majesty's Stationery Office publications was in fact thoroughly reviewed last year when the following statement was made in another place by the then Minister of State at the Civil Service Department on 29th April
A review has recently been completed. It has endorsed Her Majesty's Stationery Office's present policy of pricing their publications so as to recover—apart from Hansard, for which there is a special Government grant—all the costs of producing, publishing and selling them, and to achieve the financial target set for Her Majesty's Stationery Office trading fund. The alternative would be for the taxpayer to meet the costs of underpricing. Recent steep increases in some areas are the consequence primarily of recovery from past underpricing and the identification for the first time of full costs. Within this overall policy, however, the prices now being charged by Her Majesty's Stationery Office for most one or two page publications will be held at their present level for at least 18 months and more flexible arrangements will be introduced for settling the prices of important publications.The procedures criticised in the report by the European Parliament have little relevance to the position in the United Kingdom, where Her Majesty's Stationery Office has now been set up as a Government Trading Fund with a modern management 218WA accounting system and a clear commercial remit. About 70 per cent. of its printing requirements are already contracted out to the trade, which is more than the figure for the European Communities.
Both the House of Lords Paper (No. 200 of 1981–82) and Cmnd. 8620 were priced against a series of standard pricing scales that relate price to page content and format. In accordance with Her Majesty's Stationery Office's remit as a Trading Fund, these scales are designed to recover not only the cost of printing and paper, but also the costs involved in publishing, stocking, distribution and selling, which are usually several times greater than the cost of production alone, especially for items containing very few pages.
In the case of Cmnd. 8620, the title page and contents could not be accommodated within 4 pages. The use of 8 pages instead of 6 is more economical in that the potential saving in paper costs is more than offset by the extra cost of producing a 6-page publication with a trimmed and inserted leaf.