Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will take steps to (a) speed up the handling of Freedom of Information requests across Government and (b) reduce the number of refusals to those requests.

FOI compliance statistics for all government departments are published on a quarterly basis on GOV.UK at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics. Between July-September 2024, across all departments, 90% of requests were responded to in time (up from 88% in Q3 2023). The outcomes of resolvable requests vary between departments and reflect the protections the legislation provides for sensitive information.