§ Mr. BradyTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many days on average her Department took in session 2002–03 to give a substantive answer to a parliamentary question for ordinary written answer; and what the greatest number of days taken to answer such a question was. [155923]
§ Alun MichaelRecords for session 2002–03 were not maintained in such a way to enable the Department to extract the information requested without incurring disproportionate costs but this sort of information will be available in the future following the creation of a new database.
Defra endeavours to reply to all parliamentary questions within parliamentary deadlines wherever possible. None of the 5,444 questions tabled to the Department during the 2002–03 session were left unanswered at Prorogation.