Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to correspondence from her Department to the hon. Member for Lichfield's office dated 7 December 2021 on a constituent's communication on immigration, which stated that her Department's Private Office Direct Communications Unit would not reply due to their judgment that the constituent’s email was of a racist and offensive nature, what her policy is on whether (a) Ministers are shown all correspondence from Members and (b) officials can make the decision not to respond to a constituent's communication passed on by a Member.

When the Department receives correspondence, it is triaged by officials to assess the appropriate response, which includes consideration of whether a letter may not be suitable for a reply due to racist or offensive content.

Any correspondence received directly from a Member is shared with the relevant Minister’s office. Where constituency correspondence is provided directly from Member’s offices, rather than from Members themselves, the Minister’s office is not routinely shown the correspondence if it has been assessed to fall into the racist or offensive content category.

In this case there was an error in the process for assessing whether the correspondence was racist or offensive and a substantive reply should have been sent. The correspondence will now be replied to by me as the Minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration as a matter of priority