HL Deb 12 January 1998 vol 584 c121WA
Lord Lester of Herne Hill

asked Her Majesty's Government:

What are the annual profits made by the Public Record Office for each of the past five years and the proportion of those profits attributable to income received from photocopying charges.

The Lord Chancellor

The Public Record Office has made no annual profit in the past five years. Charges for photocopies and all other charges are set to recover full cost with no profit element.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill

asked Her Majesty's Government:

What charges are imposed by the Public Record Office, per page, for photocopying public records; and how such charges are calculated and regulated to ensure that they are no more than is appropriate and necessary.

The Lord Chancellor

The current charges for electrostatic copies from original documents are set out in the Public Record Office (Fees) Regulations 1997 (Statutory Instruments 1997/400) a copy of which is available in the Library.

The charges for photocopying of public records are calculated on the basis of full cost recovery in accordance with H.M. Treasury rules. Full cost is the total cost of the service including copying costs, costs of sales and overheads.

The charges are made under the provisions of the Public Records Act 1958 section 2(5). They are reviewed annually to take account of likely changes in cost and demand. Proposed changes are considered by the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on Public Records, agreed by the Lord Chancellor and H.M. Treasury and implemented by statutory instrument. Every effort is made to keep the cost of copying to a minimum. However the public records are unique and their nature and format often makes them unsuitable for conventional copying methods: considerable care has to be taken to ensure that they are safely handled in order to preserve them for posterity. In some cases specialised equipment and labour intensive handling techniques are required and these inevitably have an impact on costs. The office is gradually increasing the amount of material made available to readers in surrogate format (for example, microfilm, electronic image) so that more copies can be made by cheaper self-service methods.