§ Mr. CohenTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what is the ongoing cost to his Department of monitoring the current costs relating to the contract for his Department's data processing work.
§ Mr. Michael ForsythThe total costs of managing the contract for information technology services provided by Sema Group plc are about £420,000 a year. They reflect the separation of purchaser and provider roles in the Department and would have been incurred whoever had won the market test for information technology services. Estimated average annual savings arising from this market test are about £4.8 million or a saving of about 30 per cent. of the cost of comparable IT services under the former arrangements.