Written question asked by Brooks Newmark (Conservative) on Thursday, 25 January 2007, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 29 January 2007. It was answered by Ivan Lewis (Labour) on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Departmental Expenditure

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Health how much her Department spent on buying, operating and supporting (a) all commercial software products and (b) software products produced by Microsoft was in each of the last three years.

Answer

The Department’s expenditure on commercial software products for the last three financial years is shown in the following tables.

Software purchases
£
	Financial year
	2003-04¹	2004-05	2005-06
Microsoft products	167,310	77,331	78,707
Other products	8,532	109,118	136,016
Total	175,842	186,449	214,723
¹ The Department changed its software supplier in September 2003 as part of its re-tendering of the outsource contract to run and support the Department’s IT infrastructure. Figures for 2003-04 are readily available for only the final quarter of that financial year.
Note:
All figures given are direct costs incurred from suppliers.

Software licence renewal, including software supplier maintenance and support charges
£
	Financial year
	2003-04	2004-05	2005-06
Microsoft products	0	0	0
Other products	516,930	1,072,730	1,100,594

The Department has outsourced the operation and support of its information technology infrastructure, which includes the commercial software products used to provide services. It is not possible to identify separately the cost of operating this software from the overall cost of the service provided.

Connecting for health
£
	Financial year
	2003-04	2004-05	2005-06
Microsoft products	13,799	20,149	27,309
Other products	134,202	665,215	1,864,788
Total	148,001	685,364	1,892,097

The expenditure in the table covers software purchase, software licence purchase and software maintenance expenditure costs. All figures given are direct costs incurred from suppliers. No internal costs of supporting or operating the software products have been included as these are not readily available.Where items have been classified as Microsoft this is where it is clear from the expenditure description that it is a Microsoft product. Where it is not clear what type of software this is, it has been classified as not Microsoft.The figures cover software products for internal use and exclude software purchased on behalf of the national health services.

Secondary information

Type: Written question
Reference: 112606; 457 c1280-1W;457 c1267-8W
Session: 2006-07
Subjects: Software Department of Health Microsoft
Link: View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk

Departmental Expenditure

Secondary information

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