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

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what estimate he has made of the savings to his Department from the Q&A system in the (a) 12 months and (b) five years since 4 June 2014; what additional ICT systems or improvements to existing systems his Department has introduced or plans to introduce that would not have been feasible without the Q&A system; and what assessment he has made of the extent to which the system has made it easier to answer questions from hon. Members on time.

The establishment of the House’s new Q&A system for processing Parliamentary Questions overlapped with the introduction of a new IT system within DCLG, which covers correspondence and Freedom of Information requests as well as Parliamentary Questions. This uses an ‘off-the-shelf’ package; this involved considerably less cost than would have been the case with development of a bespoke system.

Our system has been developed to enable electronic transfer of questions and answers between the two systems. Both systems offer some opportunities for speeding up processing and improved monitoring facilities. The most immediate impact of the introduction of the Q&A system has been the ending of the need to subscribe to the daily House of Commons question feed service provided by The Stationary Office. This saves around £5,000 a year.

The Department’s system has been in use since the beginning of September and work is continuing to develop its configuration to improve the way parliamentary questions are handled. When the new system has bedded in we will review processing arrangements to assess their effectiveness and explore whether further improvements can be made.

It will be for the Procedure Committee to evaluate the effectiveness of the new system in improving performance when it assesses the evidence following the end of the session.