Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the average response rate was of his Department to individual Freedom of Information requests in each month since July 2016.

The Government publishes statistics on the operation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) 2000 within central Government, including timeliness, on a quarterly basis. The figures for requests received from July to September 2016 have been published at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics.

The figures for October to December 2016 are to be published shortly and those for January to March 2017 are yet to be compiled. FOI statistics are Official Statistics and are governed by the standards set out by the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) in their Code of Practice. To publish information outside of the release timetable would be a breach of Protocol 2 of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.