Correspondence (Hansard, 29 February 2000)

§ Mr. Straw

On the basis of the information available, hon. Members have asked 91 Parliamentary questions since May 1997 about correspondence to which they had not received a reply at the time of tabling the question. The number of such Parliamentary questions asked in each month for each year is given in the table.

Parliamentary questions tabled by month
	1997 ¹	1998	1999	2000 ²
January	—	2	1	16
February	—	5	2	5
March	—	5	4	—
April	—	1	2	—
May	—	—	2	—
June	—	3	4	—
July	2	3	5	—
August	—	—	—	—
September	—	—	—	—
October	—	—	4	—
November	3	3	10	—
December	2	2	5	—
Total	1	24	39	21
Overall total		91
¹ From May
² To end February

Information on the time taken to deal with the individual items of correspondence about which the Parliamentary questions were asked is held centrally in only 69 of cases. The average time taken to reply to these items of correspondence was 64 working days.

The time taken to reply to each item of correspondence (in working days) where information is available is given in the table.

Time taken for reply in working days	Number of items
6	1
15	1
22	3
23	1
27	2
30	1
31	1
32	1
33	1
36	1
37	1
38	2
39	1
40	3
41	3
42	1
44	2
45	1
46	1
47	1

260W

Time taken for reply in working days	Number of items
48	1
51	1
56	1
58	1
62	1
63	1
65	2
66	1
69	1
71	1
74	1
78	3
80	2
82	1
84	1
85	1
86	3
88	1
89	1
90	1
91	2
97	3
103	1
104	2
108	2
109	1
115	1
131	1
134	1

My Department deals with large amounts of correspondence each year from both hon. Members and members of the public. In 1999, we replied to 17,703 letters from hon. Members. We aim to send a substantive reply to all correspondence as quickly as possible, and we are committed to monitoring and achieving a high standard of performance in this area.