§ Baroness Byfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
How many special advisers are employed in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. [HL14]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Whitty)Three.
§ Baroness Byfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why details of expenditure on professional advisers and private sector consultants are not held centrally by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, given that such information is available from other government departments, such as the Department of Health. [HL16]
§ Lord WhittyThe department is unable to speculate why details of expenditure on professional advisers and private sector consultants are not held centrally by Defra in comparison to other government departments.
The department holds details of all its contractors sufficient and necessary to discharge its payment obligations under the terms of contracts agreed with those contractors. This enables the department to report annually to Parliament on its prompt payment performance. The department also has systems that enable it to report annually its value for money achievements with regard to departmental expenditure on goods, services and works. Its financial, accounting and budgeting systems are subject to annual review by the National Audit Office.
Details of contracts held with professional services providers, of which expenditure on professional advisers and private sector consultants is a part, have not been held centrally to date, but are held within the areas that have been given the delegated budgetary authority and responsibility to let and manage those contracts. The resource costs of extracting information from all those areas is often hugely disproportionate to the nature of the information being sought.
As part of its preparations for, and implementation of, the Gershon value for money agenda in Defra, Pareto or detailed expenditure distribution analysis of departmental expenditure on professional services is now being undertaken, and will be made available publicly in due course.
81WAAdditionally, the department has, as part of its e-procurement strategy, implemented an e-contracts database which has been live and available for use since 1 April 2004. The database is being populated as it is being rolled-out across Defra and from the end of March 2005, all contracts entered into by Defra from that position time will be recorded on it.