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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what data their Department holds on the average response time to written parliamentary questions in the last six months; and what assessment they have made of the adequacy of that response time.

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.

Departmental performance on Written Parliamentary Questions is published at 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.

This year's data will be published by the Procedure Committee when the session concludes. Every effort must be made to reply to Written Parliamentary Questions within the 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.