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Written Parliamentary Questions: 5th May 2006

Primary Care Trusts
Q:To ask the Secretary of State for Health how much money had been committed by each primary care trust to purchasing private services at the end of December 2005; and how much has been budgeted by each primary care trust for such activity for the financial year 2005–06.(John Hemming)

A:The information requested is not collected centrally. (Liam Byrne, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Health)

Gas Supplies
Q:To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry pursuant to the answer of 19 April 2006, Official Report, column 675W, on gas supplies, if he will provide his Department's detailed calculations based on the IMF data and the Royal Bank of Scotland data which were used as the basis for the statement on German gas prices. (John Hemming)

A:The information is as follows:

As at December
2004 2005
IMF Data: Russian Natural gas border price in Germany (US$/thousand cubic metres) 156.24 250.56
RBS Data: US$: Euro exchange rate 0.74596 0.84371
Conversion of thousand mcm to Mwh 1000 cm= 11.06 Mwh
Russian gas at German border price (Euro/Mwh) 10.54 19.11
Increase over 2005 80 per cent

Notes:

IMF data is publicly available (from http://www.imf.org/external/np/res/comnaod/index.asp) and has been converted to standard European units for the sale of gas using Royal Bank of Scotland publicly available exchange rate data (from http://www.rbs.com/content/media_centre/rbs_and_the_economy/rate_calculator/) and appropriate conversion. (Malcolm Wicks, Minister for Energy, Department of Trade and Industry)

National Health Service
Q:To ask the Secretary of State for Health pursuant to the answer of 4 April 2006 to question 59146 on the National Blood Service, what estimate the National Blood Service has made of the number of calls made from call centres in her Department in 2004–05 using predictive dialling; and how many such calls resulted in silent calls. (John Hemming)

A:Data for the year 2004–05 can be obtained only at disproportionate cost. However, the National Blood Service (NBS) has provided data for thepast year.

The NBS made 1,467,382 calls between 1 March 2005 and 21 April 2006. Over this time period, 3.7 per cent. of these calls were abandoned, representing those occasions when the called person answers and it appears no-one is there, due to the slight delay before an operator comes on the line. The NBS continues to improve its abandonment rates, which have dropped to three per cent, in January 2006. These levels are within Ofcom's guidelines of no more than 5 per cent. silent calls. (Caroline Flint, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Health), Department of Health)

Comments

Bob Piper said…
Much anxious posting as John tries to hide the previous post and the difficult comments? Of course not.

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