Mark Prisk (Shadow Minister (Business and Enterprise), Business; Hertford & Stortford, Conservative)

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what the procurement budget of his Department and its predecessor was in each of the last five years; and what proportion of that budget was spent on contracts placed with small and medium-sized enterprises in each such year.

Patrick McFadden (Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; Wolverhampton South East, Labour)

The Department does not separately identify a procurement budget within its total allocation of resources and neither did its predecessor departments, BERR and DIUS.

Information on the percentage of procurement spend with SMEs is not generally recorded but in 2007-08, an exercise was undertaken that showed that SMEs accounted for the following percentages of total procurement spend:

BERR—13 per cent.

DIUS—32 per cent.

The definition of an SME is taken from the Glover Report, which refers to EU (Recommendation 2003/361/EC) and stipulates that an SME is an organisation with a headcount of less than 250 and a maximum turnover of £40 million.

Further information is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.