Question

To ask the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney, representing the House of Commons Commission, what the average cost was to the public purse of administering an Early Day Motion in the latest 12 months for which data is available.

It is difficult to provide an accurate figure for the cost of administering an Early Day Motion as staff in the Table Office and the Procedural Publishing Unit who process EDMs have a wide range of other responsibilities and time spent exclusively on EDMs is not recorded.

We are able to provide a broad estimate based on staff time alone, but it should be noted that this takes no account of other fixed costs such as office accommodation and, notably, the cost of developing and maintaining the digital systems used to process EDMs.

The Table Office estimates that processing an EDM takes about five minutes of staff time if it is submitted electronically, 10 minutes if submitted by email and 15 minutes if submitted in hard copy.

The approximate staff costs (based on 2023 payscales) for processing EDMs by the Table Office are:

Although the Table Office does not record how many signatures it adds to EDMs through hard copy signatures and by email each day, we estimate that it takes approximately one minute to add each signature (at a staff cost of approximately £0.27). In 2023, there was an average of 11 signatures for each EDM.

After EDMs have been processed by the Table Office, they are published by the Procedural Publishing Unit. This involves downloading script, moving the information into a template, checking the content and publishing to the website. The process costs approximately £6.90 in staff time. The additional time for publishing each EDM is low – i.e. the cost is likely to be very similar whenever more than one EDM is published in a day. In 2023, on average eight EDMs were published on every sitting day. The average cost for publishing each EDM to the website was therefore £0.86.

In 2023, the average daily cost for printing paper copies of all EDMs tabled on each sitting day was £43.

Therefore, the average cost of administering an EDM submitted electronically in 2023 is estimated to be £11.90, which as noted above does not include certain fixed costs or expenditure on digital systems.