§ Mr. BercowTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what the cost has been of criminal damage to his Department's buildings in each of the last four years. [44845]
648W
§ Mr. MacShaneIt is not possible to provide figures for the cost of criminal damage to FCO buildings in each of the last four years for the following reasons
(a) Repairs to buildings following such incidents are funded from many different sources among them local budgets, command budgets, estates budgets and occasionally from Estate Strategy Unit's (SSU) budget. They would be in most cases identified as routine maintenance charges, rather than specifically connected to an incident of criminal damage in the accounts.(b) Many posts do not report minor incidents of criminal damage, but simply get on with the job of repair required, funding them from their local budget. Centrally held records within SSU are, therefore, only indicative of reported incidents, and do not accurately reflect the true picture.(c) Records of damage caused by criminal activity to HQ buildings in the UK are kept, but logged only as an incident in the normal incident logs. To identify the cost involved, after the fact, would involve trawling through all the incident logs, then checking jobs logged to the Facilities Management Helpdesk during the same period and finally comparing any related jobs with invoices, presented by the relevant service provider, from the same period. This is a highly labour intensive process, far in excess of the cost where it becomes disproportionate to the answer.