Written question asked by Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Conservative) on Thursday, 5 February 2009, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 9 February 2009. It was answered by Gerry Sutcliffe (Labour) on Wednesday, 11 February 2009 on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Departmental Databases

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what the cost of maintaining the databases owned and managed by (a) his Department and (b) its agencies was in (i) 2006, (ii) 2007 and (iii) 2008.

Answer: Database maintenance costs in my Department are made up of the cost of the software maintenance from the supplier and the day to day maintenance carried out by our outsourced IT service provider, Atos Origin. The latter is included in the outsourced ICT contract service charges with Atos Origin and it is not possible to disaggregate the cost from the service charges. My Department does not separately identify database management expenditure and aggregate information is not available before 2007-08.Database maintenance charges paid to software providers by my Department and its agency was £217,448 in 2007/8 and £168,394 so far this financial year.

Secondary information