Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what target his Department has for responding to correspondence from hon. Members; and what recent assessment he has made of his Department's performance against that target.

The Department's target for correspondence from hon. Members is to reply to 90% of cases within 18 working days. The recently published cross-Government league tables for 2020 are available at the following link:

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

During 2020 we received 31,509 cases from hon. Members compared to 10,467 in 2019. Our performance against the target was 18% in 2020 compared to 67% for 2019. The Department is currently working to improve response times for 2021.