(1) How many internal staff development courses has the department, or any agency in the portfolio, conducted since 3 March 1996.

(2) What is the cost of internal staff development courses the department, or any agency in the portfolio, has conducted since 3 March 1996.

(3) How many staff have attended internal staff development courses the department, or any other agency in the portfolio, has conducted since 3 March 1996.

(4) (a) How many internal staff development courses conducted by the department, or any agency in the portfolio, since March 1996 have contained training on making decisions under the Freedom of Information Act; and (b) of this number, how many; (i) were specifically focusing on the subject of freedom of information decisions, and (ii) how many dealt with the issue amongst others.

(5) What is the total cost of the courses in (4).

(1) - (5). A wide range of staff development options, including internal and external courses, on-the-job training and other learning activities have been available to the staff of my Department since 1996. Responsibility for those training activities has been increasingly decentralised in my Department over the past 10 years. Learning has also been integrated into performance and learning agreements that seek to tailor, at a local level, individual needs to operational requirements. Given these changes, there is no accurate means of collecting aggregated records of training and staff development activities. In addition, the level of resources required to retrospectively estimate these activities would involve a heavy investment in resources that could not be justified.