Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps they are taking to reduce backlogs of Member correspondence in their office.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence, particularly from Parliamentarians. As per the Cabinet Office’s Guide to Handling Correspondence, departments and agencies should aim to respond to correspondence within a 20-working day target deadline. Every effort is made to provide prompt responses to enquiries, and we continually seek opportunities for improvement in these areas; doing so in regular collaboration with other departments across Whitehall to share best practice.

With regards to timeliness of responses to enquiries received by members, the Cabinet Office published data on this for 2022 for all government departments on GOV.UK in March 2023, and will be publishing data for Q1 and Q2 2023 shortly. In 2022, DCMS answered 62% of ministerial correspondence cases within 20 working days, and this dataset can be found here. The department does not hold a record of the average response time for correspondence.