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26 Mar 2009 : Column 608W—continued
Community Care Grants
Andrew Selous: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the average length of time taken to (a) process community care grant applications and (b) review community care grant decisions is in each of the smallest geographic areas for which figures are available. [264590]
Kitty Ussher [holding answer 19 March 2009]: The information is in the following table.
Departmental Databases
Mrs. Laing: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many (a) records and (b) data fields there are in (i) the Customer Management System, (ii) the Patient Modernisation Programme, (iii) the Pensions Transformation Programme, (iv) the Customer Information System, (v) the Tell Us Once system, (vi) the Income Support Computer and (vii) the Data Matching Service. [265738]
Jonathan Shaw: The Department for Work and Pensions holds a large amount of data in order to process benefits and deliver the wide range of services for which it is responsible.
Customer Management System: this system holds 480,000 customer records and 1,300 data fields.
Patient Modernisation Programme: this is not a Department for Work and Pensions’ computer system.
Pensions Transformation Programme: this system holds 6.5 million cases and 15,500 data fields.
Customer Information System: this system holds 92 million person related records and 9,800 data fields.
Tell Us Once system: this system is currently in feasibility and testing within 14 local authority areas. It only collects the information that a customer is already required to report following a birth or a death. To date the service has collected and stored information from 8,440 people in up to 110 data fields depending on their circumstances.
Income Support Computer system: 8 million cases of which 5 million are currently active and 700 data fields.
Data Matching Service: this information is not available and to obtain the overall number of records of all types within this system would be at disproportionate cost.
All counts provided have been rounded.
Departmental Detergents
Annette Brooke: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions if he will make it his policy to ensure that no cleaning products or ingredients of cleaning products used by his Department have been tested on animals. [261117]
Jonathan Shaw: The contractors that deliver cleaning services to DWP do not use cleaning products, or ingredients in cleaning products, that have been tested on animals and they have confirmed that this is their policy.
Departmental Lost Property
Mr. Hancock: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions whether officials in his Department who have lost laptops that were the property of his Department in the last 12 months have been charged the full value of replacement. [266233]
Jonathan Shaw: Laptops that are used by the Department are provided under contracted arrangements with a service provider. Departmental employees are not charged for the value of replacement when such items are lost.
Departmental Public Consultation
Mr. Vara: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many public consultations his Department has conducted in the last 12 months; how long each consultation was open for; how many responses were received in each case; and what the cost of conducting each consultation was. [259694]
Jonathan Shaw: The following table provides details of each consultation in my Department in the 12 months to the end of February 2009.
Providing a full answer to the last two parts of the question could be done only at disproportionate cost. The number of responses to our consultations varies greatly. For example we received over 1,000 formal written submissions to our ‘No one written off’ consultation on welfare reform, but this represents only part of the picture, given that we received numerous responses in internet-based discussion forums, and a large amount of face-to-face input at a range of different events and meetings. In contrast, for our more specialist, and often more limited, consultations in the private pensions area, for example, typically 50-100 responses are received for each.
On costs, the costs quoted for our four largest consultations during the last 12 months, are for services procured specifically to support these consultations—for
example, professional production of documents, cost of consultation events, and research. In the case of our smaller consultations, these services are not used.
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