To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how much (a) his Department and (b) its agencies and non-departmental public bodies spent on legal advice in each year since 1997.

We estimated, as part of a Treasury benchmarking exercise, that our expenditure on legal services was in the region of £40 million in 2009-10. This figure includes the cost of the in-house legal team, and services provided by the Treasury Solicitor, Counsel, Parliamentary Counsel, private law firms and other legal consultants. The figure excludes the cost of non-Government Legal Service lawyers, such as the legal advisers to the three service branches, and the costs of legal services incurred by our Trading Funds, which lie outside our departmental accounting boundary.

Information on expenditure on legal advice is not held centrally and such information for previous years could be provided only at disproportionate cost.