Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, in what proportion of cases her Department responds to representations from hon Members within the 20 working day response time target.
The Department works to a target of responding to 95% of Hon. Members’ written correspondence within 20 working days.
Performance has been impacted by a very significant increase in the volume of correspondence received, including the unprecedented amount of correspondence about the situation in Afghanistan, and more recently Ukraine. Ministers and officials have also had to instigate a remote process for drafting and signing correspondence during the period of COVID-19 restrictions.
The Department recognises that it has not been able to meet service standard in some cases, but has implemented an action plan to clear backlogs and drive up performance. The Department has recruited additional resources and expects to return to answering Hon. Members correspondence within the service standard early in the new financial year.
Data about intake and performance in answering Hon. Members’ correspondence are published quarterly with the latest quarter available at: Customer service operations data: Q4 2021 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) . This includes data up to and including the end of quarter 4 - 2021.