Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether Ministers in his Department have sent confidential information to and from their personal email addresses in the last five years.

The Cabinet Office has published guidance to Departments on the use of private email covering how information is held for the purposes of access to information and how formal decisions are recorded for the official record. Departmental Ministers are aware of the guidance and Government business is conducted in line with this. Ministers will have informal conversations from time to time, in person or remotely and relevant content from such discussions is passed back to officials.