Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what the reasons were for the time taken by his Department to reply to correspondence from the hon. Member for West Lancashire on Virunaga National Park.

I understand that the unacceptably long delay in providing a response to the correspondence in question was caused by administrative difficulties in transferring the response between Government Departments. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) responded to 95 per cent of all ministerial correspondence within its twenty-day deadline in 2013 and I am sorry that, in this instance, the response was not received as promptly as it should have been. The letter from the hon. Member for West Lancashire was recieved by the FCO on 8 September and a response was sent to her on 30 September.