To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what average time his Department took to answer questions for (a) ordinary written answer and (b) written answer on a named day in the last 12 months. (313655)

The information requested cannot be obtained on either the Department’s database system nor the Parliamentary Information Management System (PIMS) and could only be obtained by manual checking at disproportionate cost.

With effect from the current Session of Parliament, each department will provide the Procedure Committee with sessional statistics on the time taken to answer written questions. This implements recommendation 24 of the third report from the Procedure Committee, Session 2008-09.