Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps they are taking to reduce backlogs of Member correspondence in their office.

The Department continues to treat correspondence from parliamentarians as a priority and adhere to the Cabinet Office standard for responses in 20 working days. Volumes continue to be higher than they were pre-pandemic, and we are working though detailed recovery plans to improve our response rates.

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. The 2022 data is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-on-responses-to-correspondence-from-mps-and-peers-2022