Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, with reference to the National Audit Office report, Managing and replacing the Aspire contract, HC 444, published on 22 July 2014, if he will estimate the savings to the public purse that he expects to accrue from the improvement in HM Revenue and Customs IT service availability identified in that report.

Over the 7 year period from 07/08 to 13/14 there is an annual c£3m productivity improvement a year on average.

HM Revenue and Customs is in the process of preparing a Business Case to manage the end of the Aspire contract in June 2017.

HMRC has one of the largest outsourced IT contracts in the world, enabling us to deliver a very wide range of services to more than 50 million customers.

We are committed to delivering all this for the minimum cost to the taxpayer. As the NAO report recognises, the Aspire contract helped the department to collect almost £506 billion for the UK in the last year alone as well as improving services to customers.

The NAO also recognises the progress that HMRC has made over the last two years in developing in-house technical skills, so that we are less dependent on external suppliers. For instance, we recently opened a new Digital Delivery Centre in Newcastle as part of our Digital transformation programme.

We will continue to improve the performance of the contract over the next three years.