Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Hanson of Flint on 26 September (HL10489), what estimate they have made of the cost of collecting, collating and verifying the data mentioned in the question.

I thank the Noble Lord for his question. I am sure he will know that the Advisory Guide to Parliamentary Work published by the Cabinet Office sets out that there is an advisory cost limit known as the disproportionate cost threshold which is the level above which departments can decide not to answer a written question. The current disproportionate cost threshold is £850.

The Procedure Committee recommended that the threshold “be calculated only with regard to policy team time—it should not account for any central processing in parliamentary branches or WPQ teams, or the time taken by Ministers or their advisers”.

We estimate that the cost of locating and collating any relevant information and extracting the information to meet your request would exceed the appropriate limit.

This is because in order to respond to your request for information we would need to match, collate and verify information from multiple immigration data systems owned by Home Office to multiple systems containing the relevant information on Organised Crime Gangs.