Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of correspondence from hon. Members is answered by the Home Office MP Account Management Team (a) within the 20 working day standard, (b) between 20 and 30 working days and (c) over 30 working days; and what the average response time is for enquiries made to the urgent inbox.

The Department works to a target of responding to 95% of Hon. Members written correspondence within 20 working days.

Performance has been impacted by a very significant increase in the volume of correspondence received, including the unprecedented amount of correspondence about the situation in Afghanistan. Ministers and officials have also had to instigate a remote process for drafting and signing correspondence during the period of COVID-19 restrictions.

The Department recognises that it has not been able to meet service standard in some cases but has implemented an action plan to clear backlogs and drive up performance. The Department has recruited additional resources and expects to return to answering Hon. Member’s correspondence within service standard by the end of March 2022.

Data about intake and performance in answering Hon. Members correspondence are published quarterly with the latest Quarter available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/customer-service-operations-data-q3-2021 and this includes data up to and including the end of quarter 3 - 2021.

The Department does not publish data about the number of cases still awaiting a response after 20-30 days, over 30 days or those specifically made to the MPs urgent inbox.