Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what data their Department holds on the average response time to enquiries by Members; and what assessment they have made of the adequacy of that response time.

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

With regards to 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

Every effort must be made to reply to correspondence promptly and within the original deadline. However, if the matters raised in the correspondence require substantial investigation, it might not be possible to provide a substantive reply to a case within the departmental deadline.