Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what the average response time was for his Department to respond to an enquiry from an MP once an enquiry had been received by the MP (a) hotline and (b) account management team in (a) 2019, (b) 2020 and (c) 2021.

The Government attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence from MPs, either directly or on behalf of their constituents.

Defra does not have an MP hotline. The average response time for enquiries received by the Rural Payments Agency’s MP hotline was 37 days for 2019, 22 days for 2020 and 17 days for 2021.

Defra does not have an account management team, and the Defra correspondence team does not hold information on the average response time to enquiries from MPs, as correspondence performance is monitored by the percentage of correspondence responded to within the target response time set by the Department.

Data on the timeliness of responses to correspondence from MPs and Peers for 2019 and 2020 is published on Gov.uk here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-on-responses-to-correspondence-from-mps-and-peers. Data for 2021 will be published by the Cabinet Office in due course.