Written question asked by Nick Hurd (Conservative) on Friday, 29 January 2010, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 2 February 2010. It was answered by Lord Wills (Labour) on Friday, 5 February 2010 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Departmental Recruitment

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how much his Department and its agencies have spent on font licensing in the last three years.

Answer: Payments by the Ministry of Justice for software application licences, for example for Microsoft Windows, include an amount in respect of core fonts used within the application. Software publishers license fonts from foundries and are responsible for passing on the royalty to the foundries from the licence fee. The element of the total licence amount that relates to fonts is not identifiable to the Ministry of Justice as the purchaser of the software application licence.The Ministry of Justice does, however, make some payments directly in respect of the licence of specialised fonts used in publications. The amounts are not separately identified in accounting records. Payments are normally made via the Government Procurement Card and could be identified only at disproportionate cost by examining thousands of statements held locally around the business.However, we are aware that £437 has been paid in respect of five font licences in the 2009-10 year to date by the Ministry's central design team which is responsible for group wide publications.

Secondary information