§ 3. Mr. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield)What targets his Office has set Government departments regarding ministerial replies to correspondence received from hon. Members. [90872]
§ The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr. Peter Kilfoyle)Each Department sets its own target for replying to correspondence from hon. Members. Over the next three years, all Ministers will work towards ensuring that at least 90 per cent. of all correspondence received from hon. Members is replied to within those targets.
§ Mr. FabricantThat is a hopelessly irresponsible reply. The Minister does not set the targets or even say what the individual Department's target should be—he says only that the work should be completed within three years.
In January, I wrote to the Department of Health about a problem. It was admitted that there was a problem. Eventually, at the end of June, I received a reply saying that it could do nothing about that problem. Does the Minister agree that the targets should include not only the speed of the reply but its quality? Are not the Government singularly failing to deliver replies promptly, and developing a grand canyon between promises made and performance delivered?
§ Mr. KilfoyleThe hon. Gentleman should keep his hair on. He should not get excited by such things. As he well knows, each Department is responsible for the targets that it sets. The Cabinet Office has set its own targets. It has achieved a 96 per cent. success rate on those. My right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office has written to individual Departments exhorting them to ensure that they fulfil the requirement that, within the next three years, they meet 90 per cent. of their targets.
§ Mr. Robin Corbett (Birmingham, Erdington)I commend the Minister's assiduousness in trying to get Departments to live up to the targets that they set. Without wanting to be the school snitch, may I tell him that, in acknowledging a letter, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was brazen enough to say that its target was to 1175 reply within 15 working days but that, owing to the volume of correspondence, it could not meet that and the target was now 20 working days? In fact, the reply that I received on the back of that took 40 working days. May I urge the Minister again to place some penalties on those Departments that fail to get anywhere near the target that they themselves have set?
§ Mr. KilfoyleThere is some merit in the argument that there has been an increase in correspondence, which went up by 5 per cent., but I make it clear on behalf of the Government as a whole that we hold no brief for any Department that fails to meet within the required period the targets that have been set. It is in the interests of hon. Members on both sides of the House to ensure that there are speedy responses to legitimate correspondence on matters of interest to them and their constituents.