Question to the Ministry of Defence:

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

The Government attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of Written Parliamentary Questions.

There are three types of Written Parliamentary Question. The Cabinet Office's Guide to Parliamentary Work sets out the timelines departments should seek to meet. This can be found here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1116933/2022-10-11_-_Guide_to_Parliamentary_Work___1_.pdf

Departmental performance on Written Parliamentary Questions is publishedat the end of each session by the Procedure Committee and is therefore publicly available. You can find details of the last session's PQ performance here:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmproced/385/report.html

This year's data will be published by the Procedure Committee when the session concludes.Every effort is made to reply to Written Parliamentary Questions withinthe original deadline. However, if the matters raised in the question require substantial investigation, it might not be possible to provide a substantive reply to a case within the departmental deadline.