Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what percentage of instances of replies to written parliamentary questions does his department issue a holding answer indicating that it will not be possible to answer the question asked within the usual time period.

In the current Parliamentary session, 1,123 of 2,441 or 46% of written questions for answer on a Named Day tabled to the Department have received a holding reply. After unprecedented volumes of written questions during the pandemic, the Department has been increasing capacity to improve our performance in answering written questions in a timely way. In November 2022, 69.8% of written questions were answered on time by the Department.