§ Mr. Austin MitchellTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what web site his Department maintains on the Internet; what information is provided there; how often it is updated; what is the address; and if he or his Department answers questions and supplies additional information through the Internet. [7577]
§ Mrs. Angela KnightThe Treasury maintains its own web site on the Internet. The site provides an extensive range of information including the Budget statement and all the Budget news releases, Treasury news releases, speeches, minutes of the monthly monetary meetings with the Governor of the Bank of England, reports of the panel of independent forecasters and various other publications.
Material is added to the site on a daily basis and there is a continuing programme to add more services.
The Treasury's system can be accessed directly using any one of the addresses set out in the table. In addition, users can find the Treasury pages through either on the Government world wide web server—http://www.open.gov.uk—or the server of the Central Office of Information—http://www.coi.gov.uk/coi.
The addresses are:
- E-mail file transfer: ftpmail@hm-treasury.gov.uk
- File transfer (FTP): ftp.hm-treasury.gov.uk
- World wide web: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk
Questions are received by Internet e-mail. These are answered electronically or by conventional means, depending on the nature of the inquiry. All information currently supplied through the Internet is available in hard 85W copy. From next year, a number of charts of publicly available economic data will be available through the Internet service, but will not be published separately.