To ask the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills what the cost of maintaining his Department's website (a) was in 2007-08 and (b) is projected to be in 2008-09.

The cost of maintaining the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills website in 2007-08 was £104,336.96 inclusive of VAT.

The Department was set up with an interim site and most of its information content continued to be hosted in DCSF and BERR sites. The Department is currently in the process of changing web suppliers and completely redoing the corporate website to enable migration of all content currently hosted by legacy Departments. Therefore the projected costs for 2008-09 can be broken down into two parts.

(1) The ongoing hosting and maintenance costs with the incumbent suppliers will be in the region of £120,000.

(2) The projected total costs for redeveloping the corporate site which is broken down into initial set up costs that will only be required in 2008-09 and ongoing maintenance and service is as follows.

Setup

Design: Following a competitive tender the website redesign, including research, scoping, design and production of templates and user testing is approximately £100,000.

Hosting and infrastructure: Using a shared service with the Department for Children, Schools and Families the Department is developing a new web hosting infrastructure and content management system. This cost also includes scoping, hardware and full content migration of over 20,000 pages of content from DCSF and BERR. The cost for this is approximately £240,000.

Ongoing

There is also a projected annual maintenance and service cost which may be in the region of £85,000.