§ Mr. Ashdownasked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what percentage of the Alvey programme software engineering work has gone to the Ministry of Defence or defence-related projects.
§ Mr. PattieThe Alvey Programme is expected to provide £40 million Government funds for about 85 projects in software engineering. In these Ministry of Defence participation is currently limited to the unfunded supervision of RSRE Malvern of one academic study costing £10,000. Discussions are also in progress on a possible small RSRE participation in one major project, the £5.5 million-ICL-STC-BGC-PRAXIS-University of Manchester IPSE 2.5 project to develop advanced software tools. No Alvey software project is specifically defence related: projects set out to tackle generic issues critically important to all software producers and users, defence or civil.