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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps they are taking to reduce backlogs of Member correspondence in their office.

The Government attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence, particularly from Parliamentarians. As per the Cabinet Office’s Guide to Handling Correspondence on gov.uk, departments and agencies should aim to respond to correspondence within a 20-working day target deadline. Every effort must be made to reply to correspondence promptly and within the original deadline. However, if the matters raised in the correspondence require substantial investigation, it might not be possible to provide a substantive reply to a case within the departmental deadline.