Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps their Department is taking to improve response times to written parliamentary questions.

The Department has answered 4,509 written parliamentary questions from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the six-month period covering 1 March 2023 to 31 August 2023. Out of that number, the Department answered 3,555 within the required timeframes.

The Department has been embarking on an internal recovery programme to improve PQ performance, and in the most recent sitting month, July 2023, the Department achieved an on-time answering rate of 90.4%, exceeding our target set by Parliament.