Departmental Written Questions

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many and what proportion of Parliamentary questions for answer on a named day to his Department received a (a) holding and (b) substantive answer on the named day in each year since 2001. (190285)

Records for the parliamentary sessions 2001-02 and 2002-03 were not maintained in such a way as to enable the Department to extract the information requested without incurring disproportionate costs.

Session	Total named day parliamentary questions	Holding answers issued	Substantive answer on the due date
2003-04	626	524	102
2004-05	269	187	82
2005-06	934	619	315
2006-07	791	406	385

My ministerial colleagues and I aim to ensure that hon. Members receive a substantive response to their named day questions on the due day. Unfortunately, this is not always possible.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many written questions to his Department had not received an answer as at 25 February 2008 for (a) between two and four, (b) between four and six, (c) between six and eight and (d) more than eight weeks; and how many in each category were tabled for named day answer. (193386)

Our records are not maintained in such a way as to enable the Department to extract the information requested without incurring disproportionate costs.

However, our records show the following:

*Parliamentary questions received by 25 February 2008*
	Written	Named day
Total PQs	1,618	395
PQs answered on time	1,050	165
1 day late	119	56
2-5 days late	229	124
6-10 days late	129	25
11 days late	91	25

My ministerial colleagues and I aim to ensure that hon. Members receive a substantive response to their named day questions on the due day. Unfortunately, this is not always possible.

Volume 473: debated on Wednesday 12 March 2008