I am not aware of any study having been carried out into the cost to the Exchequer of answering a Parliamentary Question. Whether such a study would produce meaningful financial information is debatable. The cost of answering a Parliamentary Question will vary considerably according to the nature of the question asked. This would inevitably result in significant differences in the costs among Departments and indeed within a Department from time to time. As the processing of individual Parliamentary Questions is undertaken as part of the normal day to day work of individual sections within Departments it would be unnecessarily burdensome to isolate the administrative costs of processing Parliamentary Questions from the overall administrative costs of each Department.