Question to the Wales Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, what steps they are taking to reduce backlogs of Member correspondence in their office.

The Government attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of correspondence, particularly from Parliamentarians. As per the Cabinet Office’s Guide to Handling Correspondence on gov.uk, departments and agencies should aim to respond to correspondence within a 20-working day target deadline.

With regards to the timeliness of responses to enquiries received by members, the Cabinet Office published data on this for 2022 for all government departments on gov.uk in March 2023, and will be publishing data for Q1 and Q2 2023 shortly. The 2022 data can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-on-responses-to-correspondence-from-mps-and-peers-2022