Written Questions

(asked on 9th December 2014) - View Source

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, pursuant to the Answer of 12 September 2014 to Question 208443 and to the Procedure Committee memorandum, Written parliamentary question answering performance in 2013-14, published on 11 September 2014, what assessment he has made of the reasons why his Department was the third worst performing department in 2013-14 for answering named day written questions on time.


Answered by
 Portrait
Kris Hopkins
This question was answered on 18th December 2014

We are committed to providing clear and accurate answers with, where relevant, appropriate information to allow the response to be seen in the right context for both the MP and others seeing the answer. We do not consider it right or helpful to provide answers until we able to do this.

62% of named day answers were answered on the named day in 2013-14. I observe that this compares with the annual rate of 52% when the rt. hon. Member was Secretary of State under the last Administration (as stated in the answer of 11 January 2010, Official Report, Column 682W).

We have recently introduced a new IT system for processing Parliamentary Questions to replace the dated and inflexible system that had been in use for more than 10 years. This supports fully electronic processing and significant additional facilities for monitoring and reporting on the progress in responding to questions.

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