Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data their Department holds on the average response time to written parliamentary questions in the last six months; and what assessment they have made of the adequacy of that response time.

Departmental performance on Parliamentary Questions (PQs) is published at the end of each session by the Procedure Committee and is therefore publicly available. Details of the last session's PQ performance are available here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmproced/385/report.html.

This year's data will be published by the Procedure Committee when the session concludes.

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

All departments have access to regular training led by the Parliamentary Capability Team through the Government Campus. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of PQs, and officials remain committed to providing the highest level of service. To complement the work of the Parliamentary Capability Team, the MoJ also runs tailored training sessions for staff specific to PQs to drive up the quality and timeliness of our responses. These sessions have been delivered multiple times in the past six months.