Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the performance of the Members Correspondence Unit in his Department.

The Department’s Ministerial Correspondence and Public Enquiries (MCPE) unit was set up to handle centrally the large volumes of correspondence received by the Department. All lines used to respond to correspondence are provided by the Department’s policy teams and MCPE has daily contact with ministers’ private offices.

The latest available performance information was published on 26 June in the Cabinet Office’s Written Ministerial Statement on Handling Members’ Correspondence in 2017 (HCWS798). The Department answered over 32,000 items of correspondence, of which 93% were answered within the Department’s Whitehall Standard target of 18 working days.