Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, will he make an assessment of the adequacy of correspondence response times for Office of the Public Guardian.

The Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) corresponds with customers daily through its call centre, by email and by post, and aims to respond promptly to all forms of correspondence. Customers who have a query and email OPG’s customer services inbox receive an automatic acknowledgement before it is passed to the relevant team for a full response. If correspondence is in the form of a complaint, it is dealt with by the dedicated complaints teams. Complaints are initially dealt with by the relevant Tier 1 Complaints Team, who aim to send a full reply to the customer within 10 working days. If a customer is dissatisfied with the Tier 1 reply, or if any correspondence is received from MPs, these are dealt with by the Tier 2 Complaints Team, who also aim to provide full replies within 10 working days.

OPG is below its target response times primarily due to the high volume of correspondence and complaints received during the year. OPG is focussed on improving the customer experience and recovery plans are in place to return to the target response times by increasing staffing and the use of overtime to meet demand. Data on complaint response times will be included in OPG’s annual report, which is being finalised and will be laid in Parliament and published online before the summer recess.