Good afternoon and welcome to this public session of the Procedure Committee. Written parliamentary questions are an important part of MPs’ work in raising matters of public interest and in dealing with their constituency work. Our Committee routinely monitors the performance of Whitehall Departments in responding to WPQs in a timely manner and, where performance dips below a certain threshold, asks Ministers and officials to come before us and explain any issues and set out their plans to resolve them. This afternoon I am pleased to say we are joined by Steve Reed MP, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Rebecca Shrubsole, the Director of the Ministerial, Growth and Resilience team, to discuss the Department’s WPQ performance over the first part of this Parliament. Good afternoon to you both. Before we begin, will you introduce yourselves for the record?

I am Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Hi. I am Rebecca Shrubsole, Director of Ministerial, Growth and Resilience at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Thank you both for making the time to be here today. As is traditional, as Chair of the Committee I will ask the first question, and then we will have questions from other members of the Committee. The Department’s performance since the 2022-23 Session has fallen significantly below the expected 85% target for the response rate. Can you start by explaining where the delays have been occurring? Is it in policy teams or in the central processing part in the Department?

There is a lot to unpack, because it is a process, and there are bullet points at various elements of the process, but can I first thank you for inviting me here? It is important that we welcome scrutiny and challenge. It is a very important part of the democratic process, so we were more than happy to come here to explain to you the action that we are taking to deal with the problems that you have identified and that we have also seen—but also, I hope, given that you have a cross-departmental remit, to invite and welcome any comments that you might have about how we can improve the procedures. You observed correctly that performance has dipped over the period you talked about. Its going down has been unacceptable. It has been below the 85% target that this Committee sets since ’21-22, so it has been a long time that DEFRA has not been meeting the required standard on answering parliamentary questions. We had about 2,000 PQs a year in ’21-22. Since last July—the general election, when I became Secretary of State—we have had 4,000 PQs, and of course resources are smaller now than they were in ’21-22. I am not giving you that information as an excuse; it is merely to set the context within which we are operating. I am very keen and determined as the leader in the Department to demand and expect high standards, and in this case we have not achieved that, so I regret that. We are looking as a team at how we can improve that. It is important to the Department’s reputation and to the service that we provide to colleagues across Parliament. That matters to me, and it matters to the Department as well. You wrote to me in April, Chair, outlining in more detail the concerns that you have, and I took action following that. Working with the Permanent Secretary, we set up a new team at the beginning of May and gave that more senior leadership. One of our directors—Rebecca here—is leading that team. As a result of that being in place, we have increased the amount of tracking and reporting that is going on. I realised that we were not making the improvements I had hoped for from the beginning of the year, so, since we set up the new team, I receive a daily update on delays, both on named day and general PQs. That goes to my private office as well. That means that we are able to follow up and track the trends, but also identify particular problems that may be happening. You will be aware that the flow of PQs is not standard, but has ups and downs. Since the recess, for example, over the past three days, we have had 250. Over an average month, we would get more like 300, so we have had nearly a month’s worth in three days, which may be because there has just been a recess and people are catching up on their on their work. Things ebb and flow, but we get a better sense of that by closer monitoring and tracking. The actions that are identified through that monitoring are then relayed weekly to directors, and directors in the different departments within DEFRA are then required to take appropriate interventions in order to smooth the problems that are occurring. I am taking a long time to answer this question, because there is not one set of particular problems that routinely occur all the time. The increases that we will get in PQs coming in will be because a particular topic has gone higher up the news agenda. Water, for example, is very high at the moment—we have just had the Cunliffe review and issues about Thames have been raised in the Chamber—and we get a lot more PQs when that happens. That means we are not getting an even flow coming into the whole Department, but we are also not getting an even flow to share around the different teams. The water team, at a time when they are having to deal with a lot of demand from us politically because of the nature of the policy being in the spotlight, are also getting a lot of PQs. We know that we need to focus on getting those PQs back within the agreed timelines, particularly the named day ones. Those are the most difficult, because the requirement is to get them in within the number of days that is expected. We have made it clearer to the teams exactly what is required. We have set out our new quality guidelines. Before, earlier this year, we had everything going through a small team to be quality checked, which was causing a bottleneck. We have now created a set of guidelines on quality and have trained all the people who will be involved in answering PQs across the Department in what those standards are. By exception, we then intervene when they fail to meet the quality standards. We have removed a bottleneck and instead replaced it with training expectations and then intervention by exception when we think it is not working. I hope that taking a much more focused approach like that will mean that we are able to get through the volume and meet the deadlines, but also maintain higher standards of quality for the responses that are coming through.

Let me push you, Secretary of State, because I am not very clear from your answer where the bottleneck was in the Department. My question was about whether the bottleneck was with policy teams or with the central processing of the questions.

It is more with the policy teams. We only have a very small central processing team. We have put in place more senior management, and I will let Becky come in in a moment, because she knows a lot more of the detail than I do, but we have a relatively small team receiving the PQs, which are distributed to the policy teams, and the policy teams are then required to make sure that they are dealt with quickly. They then come back to the political team to check off. Frankly, where the blockage happens depends on the volumes at any particular time, and what other demands are on that particular individual from the flow of their other work. For example, if a Minister has had to do UQs or a debate in the Chamber, or a major event is happening and they have to go off to do media, while we are asking them to sign off 10 named day PQs that same day, sometimes something will slip. We have to identify when those problems are going to happen in advance and make sure that we have a route to work around them, perhaps by getting a different Minister to intervene on them. Becky, do you want to add anything to that?

I think you have covered it really well, Secretary of State. The honest truth is that there are blockers in a range of steps around the process. The Secretary of State is right: sometimes we see policy teams being overwhelmed by a very large volume, and other times we see policy teams with only a few PQs and they are absolutely able to do them on time, and that is not a problem at all. It is a variable picture, and the volume obviously has an impact on teams. As the Secretary of State explained, sometimes those teams are under pressure for other reasons, and then it can be a challenge to make sure they get through the volume. We have a small team at the centre who are checking in, chasing up on drafts and making sure that deadlines are met. Sometimes they themselves have a very high volume. As the Secretary of State said, we had 250 come in in the last three days. It is a challenge for them to allocate those out quickly; it is a very large number for a very small team to get through. The reason we have created this larger team is to make sure that we can move people and flex people within our wider support unit so that, when there is a surge, they can provide additional help and support to reflect the volumes as they ebb and flow. I hope that by doing that we will make sure that, where we can anticipate there will be a surge—for example, after a recess period, we would anticipate that volumes will be higher—we have lots of staff available to process those really quickly so that there is no delay at the centre. That will also help us to trace and track through the policy teams that are dealing with those on a daily basis.

To be quite frank about it, your Department has consistently been the poorest performing Department when it comes to WPQs. That raises the question: is there something structural about DEFRA that makes it particularly challenging to meet the 85% target for responses?

I recognise the stat, but I have not been in any other Department, so I do not have anything to compare it with. Becky, do you think there is anything structural that would lead to that?

I do not think there is anything structural, but what we have done with setting up this new unit is to create—what’s the best way of putting it?—a more senior focus on this as an area. Our teams that work on PQs are amazing, dedicated and extremely expert, but it is quite a small number of people. They are very dedicated and very expert, but they are not easy to replicate. What we are trying to do in setting up that structure is to give these really fundamental processes, which are important to Parliament and to the Department, more of a focus. We have more senior people there so that if there is a problem—for example, if it is not clear which team should be dealing with a PQ or if it is a complicated question and we are not sure whether we can answer it to the timeframe or whether it would be disproportionately expensive to answer it—we are able to provide more oversight, lean in and support with expertise. We also have a higher number of people working across things like briefing support for Ministers, who really understand the issues and work every day with our policy teams, and who can lend their advice and give them the absolute latest position on issues, so that we are starting from a better point in terms of answering questions. That is the concept.

It is an interesting question, though. It is a very broad Department. Performance has been poor since 2021-22. In that time—it is only four years—I am the fifth Secretary of State, and it has persisted through all of us. I do wonder whether there is something to do with the structuring of the Department or the nature of workflows that might be affecting this. It is worth looking into that.

It would be interesting if you could look at that. I am conscious that, as a Department, you have a lot of external bodies that you probably will engage with on responses. Does having to consult external bodies add in delays? For instance, if you get a question on which you need to consult the Environment Agency, does that slow down your process? Other Departments do not necessarily have so many external bodies.

You would expect that it would, wouldn’t you? But there should be some kind of flag on it to say that a response is required within a given timeframe, and then that should be chased if the response is not given within that timeframe. Maybe it is structural, but maybe it is also about the systems.

Obviously, I do not want to say that the Environment Agency is the root of the problem—

I used that as an example.

There are obviously people working really hard in the Environment Agency to answer questions on time. But you are quite right that we often have to reach out to our arm’s length bodies for very specific pieces of information, and at times, that can be to teams that are very small. For example, if it is in a particular area of the country and the team is only two or three people, and the person you need to talk to is out and about doing something operational, that can be a cause of delay. Again, one of the things we will be looking at is what we can do to prevent that. How can we make sure that there is a way of being clear that if somebody is not available, we reach out to someone else? Is there a way we could establish particular standing briefs or standing lines that could be drawn on if people are not there immediately to pick up the phone?

This question is probably for you, Rebecca, but do come in as well, Steve. In the first part of the 2024-25 Session, we saw an improvement in DEFRA’s performance, but it started to fall off during the second half of that period, despite named day WPQs becoming fewer. What happened there and is there any learning from that?

It is a really good question. You are quite right: we did really quite well during July, August, September and October. In July and August, we had many fewer PQs than in an average month, because obviously we had the election and then summer recess, so that was fairly easy to get on top of. But you are quite right: in September and October, we had an average number and we managed to keep on top of the case load. One of the issues towards the latter end of the autumn was the quality of our replies. We strive to give really high-quality answers, but under a new Government there will be different ways of answering questions and different preferences about how you approach those answers. The Department maybe was not quick enough in absorbing the way that the new ministerial team might want to approach the answers to some of their questions. As the Secretary of State explained, we have had to go through a process where we have developed a much more specific and much clearer set of standards for teams to use, and a style guide around the sort of quality that Ministers are expecting, but also the terminology that they feel more comfortable with us using. That has taken a while to roll out and embed within policy teams through the Department. I think we are getting there, but we are still learning in terms of making sure that we are really capturing what Ministers want to say in their responses to questions.

So very much around the tone of voice, as much as anything.

Yes, tone, and quality and specific things that Ministers want to put forward as their priorities.

We had clocked this internally as a problem before the Committee approached us about it, and I recognise what Becky is saying there. We became concerned about the quality of replies, and then I think we put in place too much checking to try to make sure that the quality was always high, and that checking created a bottleneck. Realising that that was happening, we developed quality standards and a training program to train up the people that were involved in delivering the PQs so that we could be reassured about the quality that was going out without having to check everything. It is partly a learning process, but I do think the fact that we have so many ALBs and it is such a dispersed Department, and that this has gone on through five different Secretaries of State without clear resolution, implies that the structure is an issue that we need to resolve better.

That would be—I refer back to the comments I made earlier—particularly since the letter that the Chair sent in April. We did change some of the processes at the end of last year, but I think the over-checking probably added to the bottleneck. We have a different system now. We are tracking much more closely. I am receiving a daily update in my red box every night. That goes to my private office as well. We can then make sure that the directors are intervening to deal with the specific problems, and we can also see what the blockage is and intervene if a team have been overloaded because something has become very topical and a whole load of PQs are coming in. We can make sure that resource is given to them if it is needed to clear a backlog, and make sure that the relevant Minister has space in their diary to get through a particular backlog if something is coming through in that way. We are also reaching out and learning from other Departments, particularly Departments like ours, which have a lot of ALBs, to find out how they are managing this better, so that we can learn from that. I said before that we have the new quality guidelines and training that we are still rolling out against that. I have given the Department my expectation that we will meet the 85% target by next month. I think it is important to the Department that they know what the expectation is and therefore we know what we are working towards. But I will keep receiving daily updates on this until I am satisfied the system is working.

We changed it again, yes.

I am satisfied, but as we were saying earlier, over the last three days we have had 250 PQs, so that is quite a challenge. I suspect that if I look at the tracking on those 250 the stats will not be good, but hopefully that is not a new normal, and the number will go down again. I think you probably need to give it a few weeks to see what a level run is, and we can see what the progress is on that, but the fact that I am checking and getting a daily update means that I have full sight of what is going on now.

I want to look specifically at named day questions, because our most recent set of statistics shows that they are forming a lower percentage of the overall number of questions, yet the drop-off in the number hitting their named day has been more significant. Despite the fact that they are a lower percentage, the drop-off is worse. This reflects a broader trend that we are seeing across Government—we want to be fair, and named day question performance is part of a trend. In your view, are there any particular difficulties in your Department with answering named day questions, and are there any specific actions, in addition to those that you have already outlined, around the general process for named day questions?

Obviously, named day is much more challenging because of the deadlines involved. That said, it should not be impossible to answer them to the timeframes—other Departments are performing better than DEFRA. There are a few things that we will be doing from next week. As well as the Secretary of State receiving a daily update on numbers, we will be having a daily meeting in our team to go through and track every single parliamentary question. Where is it in the system? Who is it with? Is it on track? Is it going to meet its deadline? That is so that we are really clear, as the team who are leading on this, about what actions we need to take. For example, if we have allocated a question to someone and they have not acknowledged it, we can ring them up and make sure that they are dealing with it. Obviously, with these deadlines, it can literally be only a day that someone is not on their email or at their desk, or someone has not clocked that they are not in the office, and that is enough time to put you off track with your target. We will be doing that from next week, and I really hope that it will make a particular difference on the named day PQs, because of the real tightness of our deadlines.

Which Department is doing well on them? Do we know?

Well, the information is published. If you want to have the full table, we can get that sent to you and you can choose which Departments you wish to engage with—

I don’t want the full table, but who should we look to?

The stand-out Departments were the Home Office, DFT and the Treasury. They would be good ones to look at.

Okay. The Home Office is in the same building, so—

No excuse then!

We have reached out to the DFT, and they have very kindly said that they are happy to meet us ASAP to talk through how they manage things.

You have alluded to part of this question, but we have received correspondence from an MP noting that delays seem to occur when questions regarding sewage pollution or water companies come up; do you do any analysis of what is being asked in written parliamentary questions? This slightly links back to what Cat was saying—is the Environment Agency the cause of the delay? Are you doing any analysis on the type of questions coming in and whether certain types cause a longer response?

I do not have the numbers on sewage in front of me, so I cannot be very specific about the volumes. We will have figures in the Department that break down the volumes by policy area. For example, we would be able to see if we have had a huge uptick of PQs on sewage, and if those are particularly delayed versus our other cases. I am not able to say whether that is the case, but it is certainly something that we can look at. The Secretary of State said that we want to look at whether, as a dispersed Department, there is a systemic problem. We could pick up on that as part of looking at whether there are parts of the system that are particularly struggling to come up with the answers to those questions.

That is particularly true at particular times of the year. Once the weather starts to improve, people are going out more and they discover that a local beauty spot is horrifically polluted. They then contact the MP, among other things, and the MP puts the questions to us. We are dealing with that, but probably not managing the peaks and troughs well when they happen.

In terms of that demand side, is the Department doing any work on more self-service for Members? For example, for how many questions is the information routinely published elsewhere, and an MP is just using the written question process as the easiest way to deal with it by passing the workload on, rather than trawling through a website?

I am very in favour of self-service in that sense. That is a very good point. The Department’s IT is quite poor. We have lacked investment in IT over many years. I think we are the second worst in Government for digitising things. Just in this one Department, we inherited over 300 different websites when we came in. If an MP wanted to serve themselves information, they may be very baffled by the network of things that they have to trawl through. We have been putting in proposals for improving digitisation and access to the Department’s data. It is expensive and will be part of an investment bid going through the spending review. We will find out next week how successful we have been. It is a piece of work that we know we need to do and an area of investment that we know that we need, but I think that it will help MPs. It may be that what baffles external users of DEFRA's IT is also baffling Members.

You were talking earlier about the priorities of a Minister’s role, whether they have urgent questions, a statement, media or have 10 written questions to sign off in a day. As well as being the Secretary of State for the whole Department, you are the manager of your junior Ministers as well. From a HR point of view, how much are you holding your Ministers to account on hitting their written question deadlines?

We have a weekly political team meeting, and that will be an item we cover. There are stats as part of the daily brief I get on where in the process the blockages are happening. That includes special advisers, Ministers, the policy teams and the directors. I can see exactly how many are in the system, how many have met the target and where any blockage has been, all the way through. If there is a particular blockage with an individual Minister, I can speak to the Minister and ask what the particular issue has been, and then we can resolve it together. That is the way we tackle that.

Thank you for coming today, Secretary of State. I have been a junior Minister in the Department for Transport. Those guys are good. I remember doing some work with them, and I definitely recommend speaking to them. They also have some antiquated IT systems, particularly for responses to ministerial correspondence and to WPQs. Perhaps it could be addressed across Government, and we need to take it to the Cabinet Office rather than just doing it on a Department-by-Department basis. I want to follow up on a couple of questions. First, have you done any analysis of how many questions are generating a lot of pursuant questions, because they are so delayed or the responses or the quality of the answers are not good? I have been asking certain Departments quite a few questions pursuant to a previous question, because of the poor quality of the reply, and that is doubling the caseload. Have you done any analysis of that so far?

I will let Becky speak to the stats on that, but that was one of the reasons why we became concerned about quality towards the end of last year. We then put in a process that required more checking, but the checking process itself created a bottleneck. We have moved instead to having quality guidelines, and training to support those guidelines. The idea is to have the teams following those standards, and if we then get a complaint, we go back and see whether the quality standard was met. We can then go to that team and say, “There is an issue here, because here is the expectation and it has not been met, so do we need to do additional support or training to ensure that it can be met?” The idea is that we do not go back to ask somebody to check the quality of everything, because that creates bottlenecks. You create a system and an expectation, you train to that expectation, and then you have intervention by exception when it is not being met. I think that is a sensible way to deal with it through a process.

Rebecca, have you done any analysis of that pursuant answer?

I do not have the numbers, but as the Secretary of State said, that was one of the issues that came up through the autumn, where we had that dip in performance. I know that the team looked at it at that point in time. It would be good for us to continue to keep a really close eye on that, because it is an obvious way that we can reduce the caseload. If we can ensure that we are answering the question properly the first time, giving the Member the information that they have asked for, that will be the best result for everybody.

Could you write to us with some analysis of what you have done? That would be really helpful.

Yes, certainly.

The other element is around these arm’s length bodies. I do not think that DEFRA is exceptional in that—DFT has Highways England and Great British Railways, and the Foreign Office has embassies in every corner of the world, so you are not unique in that. But I totally agree that perhaps there are ways of looking at managing those arm’s length bodies. I remember having to deal with the DVLA and DVSA when I was at Transport, and sometimes it is about understanding the urgency of that response to Parliament. Secretary of State, perhaps you could write to some of them and highlight that people are not getting back to you—is that something that the Department can look at doing?

Absolutely. I think that is sensible. You are right that we are not unique in that respect, but we have one of the highest numbers of arm’s length bodies of any Department, and we are a relatively small Department. That is not to make excuses; we need systems that can deal with that better—I agree with you. From the points that you are making, I think we should be looking more at where the same type of question is coming in from different MPs, making data more accessible so that MPs can find it or get their parliamentary office to find it for them, which is quicker than having to come via us.

I have five questions in at the moment, all submitted on 21 and 22 May—

You don’t have to ask all five now, Richard.

I am not going to ask them now, but can you give the Department a bit of a nudge in the right direction?

I suspect you will get very quick responses to those now.

Thank you, Secretary of State and Rebecca; you have given us some really good answers to our questions. I think I caught you saying at the beginning that you have fewer staff now than you did in 2021. You also referred to the relatively small processing team who allocate. Have you looked at the staffing structure to see if it is adequate for quality and quantity? Quality and quantity need to be balanced.

Thank you for your comments and question. Becky is now, as a director, in charge of the process and the teams. It now has more senior leadership, which is very important and increases its status within the Department. We are relying on the policy teams to provide the responses, and there is a reduction in numbers overall—we are looking at something like a 10% headcount reduction this year as part of the drive to efficiency. I recognise and welcome the fact that we need to do better for less. That is what any organisation over time should be trying to do. We should always be trying to find efficiency and productivity gains in the way that we are working. Some of that will come through IT, and we just talked about some of the benefits we could get by investing in and improving our IT system. That is somewhat dependent on the allocation we get to fund that. The other area is training, and identifying faults in the process and correcting those faults. We have relatively recently put in place the new standard on quality expectations. We are still rolling out the training to support that. I think it has gone across most of the teams now, but it is still under way. Over the next few weeks I would expect to see improvements in the stats that I get daily. That is why I have set what I think is not an unreasonable expectation that, by the end of July, we will hit our expected target. If I had set the target for the end of June, I think there is no way we would have been able to meet it, but I think it is a reasonable expectation to hit it by the end of July. I want it in place by the end of July, because then there is the summer recess, and we know that after recess we tend to get an uptick. Having to cope with that at the same time as meeting the new target would be quite difficult.

Thank you for answering the questions and for trying to improve things. If there were one aspect of the PQ system that you would like to change, what would it be?

Fewer questions! What do you think, Becky?

For me, we can do even better than we are doing at the moment on data and tracking. My first focus is on making sure that the Secretary of State has his update, which he does now have, and that we also have real clarity about exactly where questions have been allocated and when we are expecting them back. Every day, as a team, are we looking at whether they have come in on deadline and whether we need to chase people up? Are we building that into every single part of what we are doing? Do we have the systems that enable us to track that in a really easy way, as opposed to very laborious or time-consuming? We are putting real effort into making sure that we have that tracking and data system sorted, because that unlocks so much. When you are busy in a policy team and you have lots of things to do, you want to be told really quickly and clearly about the PQs that you have to manage. You do not want to be having to ring everyone up to ask them whether they have one; you want a list that sets out, “This needs to be done on this date. The question is this.” It is then much easier for people to take action and respond.

To add to that, I think it is about the prioritisation that we give it in the Department, because within organisations there is either clarity about what the priority is or there isn’t, and then people will make up their own priorities. By setting up this new team with a director as the head of it and much clearer expectations over meeting our targets on timeliness and quality of response, and then training to support that, we are telling the organisation that this is a priority. Saying that helps people to realise that, when a request for information comes in, they need to respond to it quickly.

I believe Richard had a very short question.

I have had a look at some of the answers that I have had to questions. The regime for environmental impact regulations is similar to the regime for FOIs. The Department seems to respond to those but sometimes blocks the PQs. The Speaker has made it really clear that you should not respond to MPs’ PQs in a way that means that they have to do an FOI. I would like to put that on your radar. If the Department is responding in that way, please could you rectify that?

Yes, that is helpful; thank you.

Finally, I know from experience, having been a special adviser to five Cabinet Ministers, that the block can be slightly at a political level. A couple of the responses that I have received have had a needlessly political bent to them, which perhaps does not add to the answer. It might be worth looking at some of that as well.

I hear what you say.

Secretary of State, you did say that, by the end of July, you are hoping to see results from the new system that you have in place. Would you write to the Committee to update us on that?

Happily, yes.

Similarly, as I am drawing proceedings to a close, if you want to write to the Committee about anything relating to the progress that the Department is hopefully going to be making, we would be very happy to receive that. Indeed, if there is anything else you want to write to the Committee on, we love receiving correspondence so feel free to do so.

We will be pen pals, Chair.

Absolutely. I thank both our witnesses for giving evidence today.