Procedure Committee
Oral evidence: Written Parliamentary Questions: Departmental performance in Session 2024-26,
HC 48 (828)
Monday 6 July 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 July 2026.
Members present: Cat Smith (Chair); James Asser; Bambos Charalambous; Sir Christopher Chope; Mary Kelly Foy; John Lamont; Tom Morrison; Katrina Murray; Lee Pitcher; Michael Wheeler; Sir Gavin Williamson.
Questions 79-110
Witnesses
I: Seema Malhotra MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Indo-Pacific) at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; and Aidan Liddle, Head of the Parliamentary Office at the FCDO.
Witnesses: Seema Malhotra MP and Aidan Liddle.
Chair: Good afternoon, and welcome to this session of the Procedure Committee. We continue our inquiry into the performance of Whitehall Departments in responding to WPQs in a timely manner. This afternoon, we are joined by Seema Malhotra, the Minister for the Indo-Pacific at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and Aidan Liddle, head of the parliamentary office at the FCDO, to discuss their Department’s WPQ performance over the last Session of Parliament. Good afternoon to you both. Before we begin, may I ask you to introduce yourselves for the record?
Seema Malhotra: I am Seema Malhotra, the Minister for the Indo-Pacific. I have responsibility for departmental operations at the Foreign Office. I am also the Member of Parliament for Feltham and Heston.
Aidan Liddle: I am Aidan Liddle, head of the parliamentary office at the FCDO, part of the private offices directorate.
Q79 Chair: As is traditional, the first question comes from me as Chair. In the last Session of Parliament there was a significant drop in the FCDO’s performance in responding to WPQs in a timely manner. Will you shed some light for the Committee on the factors that underpinned that decline?
Seema Malhotra: I will start by saying that we in the Foreign Office take written parliamentary questions and our responses to Parliament extremely seriously. It is also clear that the Department’s performance during that time was unacceptable. While that was before I was at the Department, I apologise for that.
The previous Foreign Secretary outlined a number of reasons in response to the Committee. Part of that was the unexpected increase in questions, and some was due to quite a significant increase in the challenges on the international stage. Combined with that, our data shows—when you look at the major events in that period—is that some of the drop in performance related to significant policy changes and changes in Ministers in those roles.
We do take this very seriously. I hope that the Committee recognises that since September, when the new Foreign Secretary and overall team came in, we made it a priority to improve performance, which I hope has been seen. Part of the reason for that—I am sure we will come on to this—is that Ministers and officials are now working very closely together on what we can learn from that first year and the impacts of particular moments of change or crisis on the performance of the Foreign Office. I am extremely pleased that, since May this year, 89% of responses have been provided on time, exceeding the standard of the Committee, and by the very latest figures, which cover responses through June, we are exceeding 90%.
Q80 Chair: Minister, you said that the first reason why the Department had struggled was the increase in the volume, the numbers, of WPQs that it had received. When we compare your Department’s volume with other Departments’, it is not particularly out of line. Other Departments actually had larger increases and their performance did not drop. Is there anything specific to the FCDO that meant that your Department particularly struggled with the increase in volume?
Seema Malhotra: I appreciate the question. I would highlight two things. One is the impact of Ministers’ travel; sometimes Ministers can be away for one or two weeks in the month. Secondly, some of the changes—particularly the change in February 2025, with the departure of Minister Dodds, and the change in Government policy on international development at that time—put increased pressure on the Department. That took some time to recover from, alongside the demands on Ministers’ time, particularly with there being a new Government. I am thinking of the demands on Ministers for travel.
Also at that time, the middle east was continuing to make quite a significant demand on parliamentary time and that of Ministers in the Foreign Office. Two issues that dominated much of the parliamentary time were the middle east and the Chagos deal with Mauritius. When you combine those and you see that a very high percentage of parliamentary questions were being answered by two Ministers, alongside a very high proportion of urgent questions for the whole of Government being answered by the Foreign Office, you see that there were extra demands on time.
I should highlight that it can be the same teams, particularly the policy teams, who are dealing with and responding to urgent questions and dealing with freedom of information requests, parliamentary questions and correspondence. So it is something that it is important for us to be learning from—about how you deal with the multiple demands that can arise from particular issues. Demand from parliamentarians understandably is very high in those concentrated times.
Q81 Chair: The ongoing organisational restructuring in the FDCO has not been mentioned. Do you feel that that is having an impact on response times to WPQs? I am aware that people are having to justify their jobs and put 500-word statements together, for instance, to say why their job is important. Do you think that that is having any impact on the Department’s ability to respond?
Seema Malhotra: I don’t think it is. That is partly because the parliamentary office—Aiden may want to come in on this—has been fairly consistent in terms of resource. We have wanted to implement more by way of changes to the system as a whole: improving the way officials are doing their triaging, improving the way officials work with Ministers and learning from how different private offices have different demands, depending on Ministers’ travel. Some of that is shorter travel; some of it is longer travel, like mine. I am often clearing PQs at 1 o’clock in the morning. When I finish, in the Indo-Pacific, I am usually catching up on UK business at 10 pm till 1 or 2 am Again, that can vary from office to office.
In the light of that, the consistency of resource, our trajectory of improvement overall since last summer, the systems we want to shield from the changes, the more recent demands on FCDO time, I think it is fair comment that people in the current tranche of new jobs may be extending timelines for some other, non-urgent work, but I don’t think that has applied to the work of the parliamentary office.
Aiden Liddle: That’s right, and the statistics bear that out. In the most acute phase of the restructure, in the last few months, our performance has been going up. We are now hitting about 90% fairly consistently. That is a major improvement even as we are going through the restructure. Looking beyond the restructure, the FCDO 2030 programme is about streamlining the work of the Department to make us more efficient. How we deal with parliamentary work, and PQs in particular, is a really important part of that.
Q82 John Lamont: Can you set out the process from when a parliamentary question comes into the Department until the answer goes out? Who sees it and how is it dealt with within the Department?
Seema Malhotra: I am very happy to share the process—Aidan may also want to speak. Questions come into the Department basically overnight. It is a very early start for the team; from 6 am or 7 am, they are involved in triaging questions, giving some consideration to whether they might be grouped and looking at whether they may have been asked before. They share the questions with the policy teams asking them to send in the policy outline; there may be some drafting, but that will likely come in through by the end of that first day and go into the drafting teams to put forward a draft into private offices. The drafts may have some background information providing useful context for the answers.
In private offices, the special advisers’ team will take a first look before the question arrives with Ministers, hopefully with a day to be able to respond. That is particularly important for named day questions, because it is a three-day turnaround. We review the information we have been given. We may know if there were possible alternative drafts of the answer, based on how we as Ministers might want to approach responding. Ministers will then respond back into their private office. We also have a close working between the parliamentary office and the private office. Private offices will be aware of what needs to be answered that day. If Ministers have been in meetings or travelling, there is a big attempt at 5 o’clock to say, “Look, you must get this in by 6 pm so that we can be on time.” I think we have improved the systems by virtue of what happens at what time in those few days.
Triaging has made a big difference to the speed of the answers. With triaging, we see if questions can usefully be grouped—they may be slightly different and from different MPs, but the answer will work for them all. That can speed up Ministers’ responses. In addition, there are the “I refer” questions —we may come back to this. We have now geared the system up in that first morning of triage to assess whether that question, or one extremely similar, has already been answered, such that there has not been any change, update or new information. Then we can respond with an “I refer” answer.
Q83 John Lamont: How often do spads or Ministers send the responses back? When you get the draft response, how often do you send it back for redraft?
Seema Malhotra: Redrafting has dropped significantly. It is in the single figures—just 5% now.
Q84 John Lamont: What was that figure at the start of the Government?
Aiden Liddle: At the beginning of the last Session, it was around 14%, and that dropped to around 5% by the end of the Session.
John Lamont: Sorry to have interrupted, Minister. Please continue.
Seema Malhotra: Part of the reason is more effective triaging and signposting to where a similar question has been asked before, which reduces redrafts. Over time, Ministers’ preferences are also better known to the parliamentary office teams. That has been very important because—you are absolutely right—it reduces reworking and missing the deadline. It is also very helpful when we get the questions the day before, where possible, because there is then a bit more time in the system, even if it is a named day question, to build in a redraft.
Q85 John Lamont: In the Department, are there particular spads or Ministers who are notoriously slow at turning around written responses?
Seema Malhotra: I would not suggest that colleagues are slow. There has been significant demand on two Ministers, who have answered 62% of all Foreign Office parliamentary questions since the general election. It will not surprise you that the biggest burden has fallen on the Minister for the Middle East, and secondly on Minister Doughty, with his responsibilities for overseas territories. It is not just because of the demand of parliamentary questions that falls on them. Things can change very quickly—Minister Doughty also has Ukraine, which has again been a source of huge demand in questions from parliamentarians—and there can be meetings or travel at very short notice. That has been the case for Minister Doughty and Minister Falconer. Alongside that, the number of parliamentary questions and the timeliness with which they have to be responded to has been a bit more of a challenge.
Alongside the workload, part of this is about us learning. One thing we at the Foreign Office know is that there are likely to be demands on the system at short notice. You have seen the acceleration of that in the last few years, and it is becoming a bit of a norm in today’s world, so it is about how we work in a more streamlined way to support Ministers when they are going through particularly difficult times. We all have it to some extent, but it has been particularly pronounced there, and the numbers demonstrate that.
Q86 John Lamont: I appreciate the challenges with the Ministers’ time, but have you put extra resource into the private offices and drafting teams behind the scenes to ensure that the questions are dealt with as quickly as possible, or is it just accepted that a bigger volume is coming through and it gets held up?
Seema Malhotra: We have had that debate. To date, we have sought to look at where we can streamline the processes. That is making a significant difference in the latest data for the last few months. Part of that is the reduced redrafting because of the earlier engagement, but one of the other innovations—I say innovation because we are thinking through what we can do differently and better—has been to pre-empt where there might be an issue, change or shift in international policy coming up that means that parliamentary questions may be forthcoming.
One recent example was the Ebola crisis, when we saw the early signs and were a bit up front about it. We were in meetings saying, “Should we do a statement?”, which enables us to be ahead in the Commons and recognise that it is going to be of interest. Rather than waiting, it is about how we can give information to Parliament earlier. By having a statement and being able to take questions, you can get a lot more information on the public record. For the short period of time where there is no change, that also enables you to do the “I refer” answers a bit more for parliamentarians who were not able to be at the statement or urgent question—though we are trying to be proactive with the statements—because you are referring back to something on the public record in the Commons.
When MPs get that, it is often helpful because not only do they get the answer to their question but they can see if there are related matters raised that are of interest to them and their constituents. I say that because I think where we saw an issue with the development side for the middle east, Ukraine or the Chagos deal, we have then been able to think, “How can we do something differently which reduces the pressure?”
Q87 Sir Gavin Williamson: You have touched on the issue of “I refer” answers. People often put in similar questions because they feel the response from the FCDO is inadequate; it is usually done not to create work but to get an answer that they feel you have failed to give. People have said they feel as though the FCDO does not give a quality of answer, in terms of how they respond. Do you ever review the quality of “I refer” answers?
Seema Malhotra: I think we all do. I will talk about those a bit more, because there are two different issues. One is where parliamentarians may want to see more, and the question might be whether anything has materially changed since the first question, such that the answer could or should be different. The second might be where there is a genuine complaint. Parliamentarians will always want to take the opportunity to challenge Departments if they feel they have not got full responses to their questions. That may also come in letters to the Foreign Office. We take all of those very seriously.
I read every question and the “I referred” answer to check for myself whether they are still up to date or we should add anything more. I may well say, “Actually, I think there is more that we could put in and this is where it would be helpful to do so.”
Q88 Sir Gavin Williamson: The Foreign Office lied to me when I put down written parliamentary questions on Lord Mandelson; the answers have transpired to be completely untrue. Do you take seriously the fact that you as Ministers have given false representation in those answers?
Seema Malhotra: In relation to Lord Mandelson—it may be helpful for Aidan to come in on this as well—the Government sought throughout the Humble Address process to co-ordinate across Government to ensure that Parliament’s instructions were fully responded to.
Sir Gavin Williamson: This was prior to that; it was this time last year.
Seema Malhotra: Okay. I am not familiar with your particular question, so Aidan may want to come back on that. What I will say, because it is relevant to the Committee’s work on the Humble Address, is that there was a large number of questions, particularly between February and June this year, that were within the scope of the Humble Address—
Q89 Sir Gavin Williamson: Do you feel uncomfortable as a Minister that things that ended up being proven to be absolutely untrue were stated in answers to written parliamentary questions from Members of Parliament in relation to Lord Mandelson? Do you feel you got dragged into the cover-up?
Seema Malhotra: I am not sure I would say that. I am sure that everything answered would have been as true as it was known at the time. What has been helpful about the Humble Address process is being able to go through in extraordinary amounts of detail what was known and what could be shared and so on. It may be something that Aidan wants to come in on.
Aidan Liddle: All I would add is that the Foreign Secretary asked officials to, or committed to the Foreign Affairs Committee that officials would, go back and check all the material that had been shared with Parliament on that issue—including PQs, submissions to the FAC, statements and other material—and to check the accuracy of that material. It was shown to be accurate.
Sir Gavin Williamson: But I’ve got—
Chair: As Chair, I should step in to remind you, Gavin, that we do not accuse other Members of lying. The rules of the Chamber also apply in Committee. Have you finished your point?
Q90 Sir Gavin Williamson: No. In a case in which the FCDO gave a deep inaccuracy in response to a written parliamentary question relating to Peter Mandelson, what action would be taken by the Department to correct that?
Aidan Liddle: If a Member wanted to highlight that perceived inaccuracy, we would certainly look at it and endeavour to correct the record if it was indeed inaccurate.
Chair: Gavin, your line of questioning has gone slightly beyond the scope of the inquiry, so I am going to bring in Michael Wheeler.
Q91 Michael Wheeler: To get back to the inquiry, we note what you said about the most recent performance statistics and turning the responses around. Can you go through in detail the changes that were made to internal processes to achieve that improvement in performance? How can those changes and that improvement be embedded and consolidated?
Seema Malhotra: It is very helpful to work through the changes. First, it is worth saying that there was a tightening up of the central processes with the parliamentary office, and that relates to a reformed triage system. As part of that work, we strengthened the training given to staff on parliamentary question processes and on why they are so important as part of the Government’s accountability to Parliament. I myself have attended general staff briefings from FCDO Ministers about what is important to them, and I have relayed some of those messages so that it is understood more clearly and directly from us as Members of Parliament.
The systems we reformed have involved a more intensive process on the first day, with daily checking in with teams about processes and getting answers back. In addition, ministerial private offices get a dashboard every week to show the performance of their Minister and others. That supports earlier intervention in those circumstances. We also monitor PQ performance quarterly at the FCDO’s management committee, which is chaired by the permanent secretary.
The triage at about 6 am or 7 am is important in terms of looking at what questions could be grouped or what may have been asked before. I want to briefly highlight the question about the resources in the Table Office. From my earlier days as a Member of Parliament, I remember having questions refused because very similar ones had been asked in the recent past. That does not seem to happen as frequently now. The triaging is helpful in terms of where we might refer parliamentarians to previous answers in “I refers”. The insights that come from that part of the process, with questions that are being asked more frequently, is where we may want to see some other interventions.
We then go through the process that I highlighted: after a question comes in, it goes through to the policy teams and then comes back to the drafting teams. That then goes through to a review process and then to the special advisers. The important part of the special adviser’s role is that they can see what is coming in across the Department and where there might be common themes or issues. We are then able to get the question and the draft answer given to us, hopefully the day before, but if not, on the morning that a named day question is due. Sometimes there can also be one or two days for ordinary questions as well.
Aidan Liddle: The only thing I have to add is about the communication between the parliamentary office and Ministers’ private offices now. Every morning, the parliamentary questions team sends a list to each private office of what is coming up that day and the next, along with what should be the priority for the Minister to sign off that day. That much more dynamic conversation between the parliamentary office and the private offices has made a big difference as well.
Q92 Michael Wheeler: Are you confident that the new processes are embedded as part of normal working practice and will deliver the standard going forward?
Aiden Liddle: That is certainly our intention. There is obviously more that we can do, and we will always look to improve the process incrementally as we learn lessons. We are also hoping to inject more technology into the process to try to help not only the triage process but the private office end of the process as well. The more processes we can automate, or at least make less manual, the quicker they will be and the less room for error there will be.
Seema Malhotra: I have another point to make, but first I want to put on the record my thanks to FCDO officials. An extraordinary amount of work has gone into looking for improvements.
To build on what Aiden said, we are looking to bring in a new case management system—that is likely to be from early next year. We will then be able to take learnings from how we have changed the processes and look at what we can build in so that the technology does it for us. We can use AI tools to help with and improve some of the grouping at the beginning. It still involves the human at every stage at which we are making decisions, but it can speed up the process.
Departments have slightly different ways of doing it based on the volume of questions they receive, the slightly different nature of the questions, and the inputs from across their Department. The Foreign Office has extensive country teams—the desk teams—and given the themes of security and migration, the matrix of challenging questions is enormous in the Foreign Office.
We need a case management system that is more tailored to the processes that we have and need to make it swifter for parliamentary questions, rather than what we have at the moment, which is a system that has been designed for other things, such as correspondence or FOIs. We need something that learns what processes we actually have and that can support the technology to deliver those processes. We hope that the streamlining will become an increasing part of business as usual and reduce the human resource.
Chair: James has a question specifically on your point about AI, Minister. He needs to leave for a meeting shortly, so I hope he can quickly ask his question and quickly get an answer.
Q93 James Asser: We have been probing the use of AI in written parliamentary questions from both sides. Do you use AI in answering questions? If so, what role does it play?
Seema Malhotra: One of our concerns is about the use of AI in asking questions. You cannot say for sure, but it certainly feels that that has been the case, and we raised this in my response to the Committee. There might be a press release, for example, and suddenly you have a load of questions asked about it instantly.
In relation to AI in responding, we do not use AI in the answers. We might use AI to help to streamline part of the process—to go through lots of questions, look at past questions, look at where there has been something similar, or where you might have some groupings. It is probably fair to appreciate that some of that could be automated such that there can be more that is easily there for the team to review, rather than them doing some of the searches themselves. We can see that enhancing some of our systems and processes rather than necessarily guiding the drafting.
Q94 Mary Kelly Foy: In your view, what particular difficulties are posed by named day questions compared with ordinary questions? What action can be taken to overcome those difficulties?
Seema Malhotra: Named day questions are, by their nature, more demanding, because you have three days rather than five. I have some personal sympathy with having both, having been an Opposition parliamentarian for 13 long years. It is important to recognise that although we have those demands, we have tried to streamline our systems and design them such that we can prioritise, and the questions and draft answers can be put before Ministers in good time. Before some of the changes, one of the struggles was that sometimes you could get questions just before the deadline, when you may have been in meetings.
I have had the experience in both the Foreign Office and previously in the Home Office, when the current Foreign Secretary was the Home Secretary, when we needed to see improvements in the system, and things being nudged earlier for Members of Parliament. We went through a similar change process there as we have in the Foreign Office. If you can have effective prioritisation, and teams and staff are better trained, the named day questions can come in in good time—either the evening before or the early morning—for Ministers to review. Ordinary questions can come in on day four, because they are not due till day five.
An underlying problem has been the number of what we call duplicate questions. I raise this in relation to the comment I just made about the Table Office resources. More so in the past, the Table Office refused to allow you to table a question that was very similar to one that was recently asked that requires Table Office resource to be able to search, and the volume of questions has increased. This is a particularly different Parliament in that we have seen a large turnover of Members of Parliament, so we are bedding in a lot of things in different ways, and learning from them as well. That has meant that we have seen a volume of named day questions, and sometimes they do not need to be named day questions. This may also be about supporting Members of Parliament in respect of what may be a three-day named day question and what could be an ordinary five-day question, which may help Members of Parliament to get answers on time.
I reiterate the point that this comes back to the Table Office being better resourced. It should not make a difference whether it is a named day question or an ordinary question in terms of timeliness of response if we reduce duplicates and are able to support MPs to maybe make a different decision about which route they use.
Q95 Mary Kelly Foy: It might be that the Table Office is not further resourced. Your ministerial colleague at the Department for Education, Josh MacAlister, told us that he thinks the distinction should be removed so that there is only one type of WPQ. Do you agree?
Seema Malhotra: I recognise that there are different views on this. My view is probably influenced by how I have used both types of WPQ in the past. There is a point to raise about what the options are for MPs. It is really hard, especially for new MPs. I am still learning about things in some ways. I think, “Hang on a minute—I actually never knew that.” There may be a particular reason why you want a timely answer. There may be a debate coming up, and you really want to understand something that is not on the public record, or something could be coming up on the international stage. There can be reasons why having an answer in a shorter time may be useful.
We could look at whether there could be more support from the Table Office to ask MPs whether they need an answer in three days, or whether it might be five days, bearing in mind that we all want to have a system that works effectively for Parliament, and the fact that there has been a 68% increase in the number of questions on the previous year. Having ways in which the systems can work more effectively together can be helpful. From my point of view, dealing with the issues may reduce the need to change things in respect of named day versus ordinary.
Q96 Lee Pitcher: Minister, you have spent some time talking us through the efforts that you have put into improve the timeliness of your responses. How do you ensure that, and how can you assure us that the quality of those responses is not impacted?
Seema Malhotra: That is a very important question, and I know that the Committee has asked that because there is a triangle of volume, speed and quality. I will come back to the improvements we have made. There has recently been an increase in the number of responses and in timeliness.
The quality comes with how the drafts go to Ministers, and with Ministers having time for review and feedback. We have built in more time for that, which has also seen a drop in the number of redrafts. If we do an “I refer” answer—that number has increased about 39%—I always review what was said before, and that supports consistency of response as well. If you are going to change that, your new response, with the additional information, becomes the one that is on the record until there has been another material change. Sometimes when you have multiple drafters and you then get multiple responses, that can also affect the quality, because there is a bit of human error, challenge or differentiation that can be built in. Our system is protecting against some of that.
I would say that Ministers take the quality of their responses extremely seriously. If parliamentarians do not feel that they have had a quality response, there are other routes that are always available and open to them. One is to ask questions again, and parliamentarians do. Another may be to approach the Minister; parliamentarians do that all the time, and we do make ourselves available. It may also be that during oral statements, Foreign Office orals and so on, parliamentarians come back to ask something further to the question that they have asked. For the information that parliamentarians need, for their work in Parliament or for their constituents, there are those routes, and PQs are a part of that process.
Q97 Sir Christopher Chope: Minister, in the light of your answer, may I ask you about one specific recent question that you answered? You answered it on Friday. In fact, it was the only question that your Department answered on Friday. It is contained in the bulletin for 3 July and was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar, who is a member of the shadow Cabinet: “To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, whether payments have been made to Sanctuary Counsel since July 2024.” Sanctuary Counsel is a lobbying organisation that purports to give really good advice to Governments, among others, on issues of soft power and diplomacy. It was a perfectly reasonable question. Why did you answer it in the way that you did?
Seema Malhotra: I think the answer referred to where information may be available and how the FCDO will be able to update on contracts and payments in the usual way. It can be very difficult to find individual contracts and items, and we do not normally necessarily comment in that way. Correct me if I have mistaken this for something else, Sir Christopher, but I think that answer is an example of where we seek to signpost Members of Parliament to other sources where they can find the answers that they are looking for in the public domain.
Q98 Sir Christopher Chope: I shall relate what you said. You say it was signposting people in a helpful answer, but the answer you gave was, “Details of Government contracts are routinely published on the Contracts Finder and Find-a-Tender Service websites.” I looked on those websites; they are impenetrable. They cover the whole of Government—hundreds of thousands of contracts—so are you expecting me, as somebody who has followed this question, to do all that work when your own Department must know the answer to the question whether payments have been made to Sanctuary Counsel since July 2024? Far from signposting and being helpful, that was obscuring and making life much more difficult. Apart from anything else, a lot of that covers only contracts that have been in place as a result of tender. How did you think that that one sentence was going to be helpful?
Seema Malhotra: What I will say is, first, that I appreciate your feedback on this, Sir Christopher. I think that as a matter of course it should be possible to use those public sources to find answers. If that is too much of a challenge, I think that is something that Government more widely should be able to address. It is also important that Members of Parliament are able to use other sources, so where there is sometimes a challenge in those, there is a question of how to make them less impenetrable. I am sure that the shadow Secretary of State, should they require further information, may come back on that question. It is, I think, important to recognise that that is not unusual in the way that we respond. But I am very happy to follow that up if it requires more information.
Q99 Sir Christopher Chope: It did not answer the question at all; it steered the question away from a straight answer. Does your Department—or you or the officials with you today—actually know whether payments had been made to Sanctuary Counsel in that timescale?
Chair: To bring the question on to the track of the inquiry, Sir Christopher, is your question whether the Department is giving answers like this, rather than giving quality answers, to meet the WPQ’s deadline? Referring to our earlier questions, is this one of those timeliness versus quality issues where Members are given answers that they find not to be of good quality so that the Department is on time with answering?
Seema Malhotra: That is not intended to not support a parliamentarian to find an answer. There are two issues here. One is—I thank Sir Christopher for using this as an example, as I think it is intended to be, of whether it is a quality answer—where we have signposted parliamentarians before, we have not necessarily had everyone come back and say they could not then find the answer that they were looking for. I think that this is something where, if on that particular Contracts Finder site, it has been more difficult, or the parliamentarian wants to come back, then I am sure that they will use the opportunity—
Q100 Sir Christopher Chope: Is that not part of the problem? You get a lot more questions because you do not answer the question in the first place. If you think that we can all look it up on Contracts Finder, surely your departmental officials or your special advisers could have done that.
I have another question arising from this, because the second sentence of your answer was, “Details of payments over £25,000 made by Government departments are routinely published via transparency releases on GOV.UK.” I looked to see what those transparency releases were in relation to the Foreign Office, and I gave up because it was so complicated.
Anyway, the question did not relate to payments over £25,000; it asked whether any payments had been made to Sanctuary Counsel—so that seemed again to be a distraction. If the idea of parliamentary questions is for Members of Parliament to get information and for the answers to be as helpful as possible to them, I hope that you will take some disciplinary action against the people who gave you this duff answer to put down in your name.
Seema Malhotra: Again, thank you, Sir Christopher, for your feedback on that, which I know was another parliamentarian’s question. We will always look to where we can improve responses. If finding the answer was not straightforward in this case, I am sure that there will be another question coming in. Parliamentarians do that.
Sometimes when you ask for information—I have had this when I have previously asked questions—you do not always know where information might be. It may be that the parliamentarian was looking to know about amounts that were higher; for some, it can be quite useful to know that there is another site where, for particular categories of payments, there may be more information. I will absolutely take away whether we can improve or check how easy it is to access information by doing your own searches via those sites. That is a very helpful point.
Sir Christopher Chope: Can you also answer this question and save me having to look it up? Have payments been made or not?
Chair: The Minister has made the point that she is going to take that away and get back to us on it.
Sir Christopher Chope: Only generically; I understood her to be talking about the generic problem rather than the specific one.
Q101 Chair: Can I check, Minister, whether you are happy to take that away and get back to us?
Seema Malhotra: I think Sir Christopher was saying that it was asked by another parliamentarian, so I think what may be important is that the parliamentarian who asked the question is able to come back to us.
Sir Christopher Chope: There is no reason why any Member of Parliament cannot put down a pursuant question.
Chair: Order. Sir Christopher, I am chairing this meeting, and I think you have made your point. We have to get everybody else in.
Q102 Sir Gavin Williamson: First, congratulations on making strides and improvements going forward. It is interesting that you have had an increase in the number of questions. That is not uncommon; we have seen that across other Departments. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has had a similar sort of increase, but they are getting a roughly 100% hit rate. What do you think is different between DESNZ and FCDO?
Seema Malhotra: It is helpful to refer back to the response from the previous Foreign Secretary to the Committee, as well as to what I shared earlier about the two things that I think have been significantly different over the last couple of years.
The first thing is the extent of the international crises—both the middle east conflicts and the war in Ukraine—and also the other areas in which we have seen demands on time, which mean that two Ministers answered 62% of our PQs, which is quite a demand. The second thing is travel: Ministers from the Foreign Office are more likely to be travelling than Ministers from other Departments, although travel does take place with Ministers from other Departments as well.
There are those specific things. There is also the volume of urgent questions that have been asked in Parliament, and a very high percentage of statements—I think it is about 14%.
Aidan Liddle: The Foreign Office has answered about a quarter of urgent questions in this Session and 14% of oral statements.
Seema Malhotra: With those, it is the same teams and Ministers. We are very keen to continue improving. DESNZ is one of the Departments with which we have dialogue. We are looking to work a bit more closely with them in terms of what they have done and what they do to see if there is anything more that we can learn.
Aidan may want to say a bit more about that, but it is also helpful to share that there is a PQs working group across Government. There is a monthly meeting between the teams, which can include how parliamentary questions are being handled, how private offices are worked with, what we can learn from and what we might be doing differently.
I am sure that will also be part of the dialogue that we want to have with DESNZ. DESNZ probably has a not dissimilar volume of questions and is doing very well on that, so that is a good comparator for us to be working with.
Aidan Liddle: That is true. There are of course structural differences: as the Minister said, Foreign Office Ministers travel frequently, and that makes a difference. I have not looked at the spread of questions among DESNZ Ministers, but, as the Minister said, in the Foreign Office, they are very much concentrated on two Ministers. There are structural differences, but there is certainly a lot that we can learn.
Q103 Sir Gavin Williamson: Out of curiosity, in your weekly prayers meetings as Ministers, when was the issue of the Department’s performance in answering parliamentary questions last discussed?
Seema Malhotra: We discuss parliamentary questions quite regularly, and I think that is because we have the weekly dashboards in our private offices. I like to look at what is going on across the Department. Talking about us as Ministers, we meet weekly on a Monday as far as possible and, if there are issues, that will certainly be raised.
Q104 Sir Gavin Williamson: Obviously, performance has improved, which is to be very welcomed. Do you think the last Foreign Secretary just did not take it that seriously?
Seema Malhotra: Actually, when I looked at the data, I also looked at what had happened in the year and how they might be associated with some of the drops. It is probably the case across all Departments that, where Ministers changed, it had an impact. There was also a big policy change on international development, which led to a significant number in a short space of time. There were circumstances that were particular to that first year.
When the previous Foreign Secretary responded to the Committee, there were already steps starting to be put in place. Following a further small drop when we had the reshuffle in September, which was possibly—I haven’t looked—reflected across other Departments, it was an absolute priority for the new Foreign Secretary and, I think, all of us to see an improvement in the performance that was systemically sustained.
We were also able to bring in some of the reforms that we had brought in at the Home Office, and we saw an increase in performance there too. I am again very grateful to officials, to Aidan and the team, who have been very open-minded about where we can see changes. It is so important that we deal with every aspect of the system and that every member of staff involved feels valued and sees how important their role is, so that we have a much more streamlined and effective system where we work like clockwork, particularly through the three days for a named day question.
Q105 Chair: To follow up on your answer to Sir Gavin’s question, travel keeps coming up as a reason why the Department struggles to meet the deadline. Written parliamentary questions are not done on pieces of paper in Whitehall; they are all on an electronic system. Is that being used as a crutch more than it should be? Are there any reasons why travel has a particular impact on the Department answering questions in a timely manner?
Seema Malhotra: I think it is helpful to clarify that. The answer is that it is a genuine issue, and it is the reason why we are looking at where we can make some changes. For example, when I was travelling when I first came into the role, the PQs were sometimes kept until I got back, which led to a bit of a drop in performance. When I realised that, and when my private office shared the stats, we started to increase the work coming to me while I was travelling.
When I am travelling, it does not mean that I am just travelling. I will have a box at the airport and on the plane, and I will be straight off—sometimes straight into meetings. I could be travelling overnight and go straight into something at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning. You are always planning ahead. I could then be in back-to-back meetings with Ministers. Sometimes I will be on trips where I do not have the phones with me and I will not be on the computer until the evening.
I can speak to some changes we have made on the longer-distance trips, because I have the Indo-Pacific. We build box-time into the day more systematically. We give that information early to posts to make sure that there are box-time moments in the day, so that anything urgent from London—particularly the questions, which are the priority—will get put to me at moments in the day. We might also try to preload where there might be questions. They could be ordinary questions to which, rather than waiting a day or two, we try to preload answers if they are early.
The ability to plan more effectively around the travel is one of the innovations that we are making, but it is a real issue for Ministers, because before we travel there is an intensity of meetings and preparation; while we are travelling, there is often little time anyway, because free time is not really built in; and after travel, there is a concentration on catching up on the things that have built up. What we have had to do now is think, “How do we still manage the work through that process?” That has involved thinking a bit differently about how we plan the visits.
Q106 John Lamont: I understand clearly the challenges you face when you travel, but if the relevant spad has not signed off the response, the Foreign Secretary or another Minister is available back in London. Is there no capacity in the Department to sign off the response even though you are travelling overseas and do not have the time to do it yourself?
Seema Malhotra: You raise a question about duty Ministers, as we refer to them. The duty Ministers will take on an urgent question or a statement, for example, when the Minister who normally has responsibility for that area is not present.
I would respond to that with a couple of points. First, on the quality point, Ministers know their portfolio areas in a lot more detail than someone in a duty role would—
John Lamont: The Foreign Secretary should know everything, surely.
Seema Malhotra: The Foreign Secretary will know quite a lot, but the Foreign Secretary will not necessarily have the capacity to answer parliamentary questions on the day. Her diary, like that of most Secretaries of State, is an absolute horror, but it is important to recognise that that is partly why we have the duty Minister system.
Again, this is where we have looked to improve. A concern for Ministers is where there may be particular sensitivities. Sometimes we have to really understand the detail to know how best to answer a parliamentary question, because we will be more aware of the context in which it is being asked, so we do like to answer our own questions. That is the default position, if at all possible. That is partly why my team will send me the parliamentary questions even when I am abroad. I might finish at 9 or 10 at night somewhere in the Indo-Pacific, when it is the afternoon in London, and I will then spend two or three hours on the day box. That is something that I have learned to build into the schedule.
On an ad hoc basis, we may well answer some questions, but I say again that it comes down to the quality. I might not even ask for a redraft, necessarily, of the answer to the question—often I just edit the draft—and that detail of knowledge will not be there for a Minister who is on duty. That is why I think Ministers prefer to answer their own questions. That does not mean that the duty Minister answering does not happen ever, but it does not happen regularly in the same way that it might for an urgent question or statement.
Q107 Bambos Charalambous: Thank you for submitting written evidence to our broader inquiry on written parliamentary questions. A couple of weeks ago, we heard the Leader of the House’s thoughts on how things could be improved. Is there anything you would like to add to your written evidence on the system as a whole?
Seema Malhotra: Thank you for asking that. Let me highlight a few areas of change that might be useful for the Committee to consider. We had suggested some potential changes that could be useful to the streamlining of the system. We sometimes see a drop, not in the quality of the questions themselves but in the quality of the overall system and how it is working for us.
The first area I would highlight is the reduction of duplicates or questions that have been asked similarly. I think this may require either an increase in resourcing at the Table Office or the use of tools, perhaps such as AI tools, to see whether a question has been asked similarly in the past and to make a judgment on that. In the past, I have had it say on Members Hub, “There has been a similar question. You may want to reconsider your question.” That could reduce the grouping that we sometimes end up doing, and the volume of questions, which itself takes time. That is important, because it is about making sure that we are giving Members of Parliament the chance to ask the range of questions that they want, and as a collective too. Members of Parliament do not just look at their own questions and answers; they look at what has been asked on these topics by other parliamentarians.
Secondly, I would urge a closer focus on the rules for using AI to draft questions. I have a real concern about that. AI can be used for many things, but I feel our constituents expect us to be able to draft our own questions, to know what is going into them and to have done the research for them. It can take a lot of time to research a really good parliamentary question, and that is what we are all trained to do. The Committee may want to consider whether there should be more guidance on that.
The third area that I might highlight is recess questions. I understand that there is no limit on the number of questions asked in recess. It is not that we all give up every day of the recess to ask 50 parliamentary questions, but there is nothing to stop that happening. On the Department’s side, the challenge is the way in which those questions are handled. There are publish days on which those questions are internally shared; I am not sure whether they are externally published, but they are internally shared with Departments at the very end of recess—Aidan can come back on the technicalities. That means that, pretty much on the first day back, there might be 200 questions tabled, so you start day one after a parliamentary recess with a backlog, whereas those questions could instead be worked through, even if the answers do not come until day one and are all published together.
In recess, officials might take leave as well as others, because there are fewer demands on their time and they have very high-pressure roles during the parliamentary Session. Perhaps there could be a review of whether there should be a maximum number of questions to be asked by any parliamentarian in recess. I do not have a fixed view on that, but it might be worth looking at the data on the range of questions being asked and whether there could be some guidelines on that. Some data could underpin that analysis. We need the process to work so that there is not a massive load on day one, when there will be other demands on the Department and on Ministers’ time with questions, UQs and statements, and you will be on the back foot for a number of weeks. That cannot be in the interests of all of us.
Coming back to the point about duplicates and what might be considered an inadmissible question, if the Table Office could spend more time pushing back, that would reduce the pressure for named day and ordinaries, or at least bring them into line in a more stable workflow.
Q108 Sir Gavin Williamson: What you say is very interesting. Remind me: does the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office ever announce any policy or do press releases during recess?
Seema Malhotra: We don’t usually. Do you have any thoughts, Aidan? We do not normally make announcements during recess.
Aidan Liddle: Obviously, international affairs do not stop during recess, inconveniently, so it does happen occasionally. The problem that we have is that the parliamentary questions that follow arrive at the Department only on the first day back after recess.
Q109 Sir Gavin Williamson: You raise a very important point. I appreciate that it has been a long time since I was a Minister, but my recollection is that there is sometimes an element of relief when you get to recess. You do not have an overbearing Whips Office demanding your attendance; you do not have to go to any UQs, statements or, God forbid, Westminster Hall debates. There is a sense of liberation and of being able to do a bit more, although maybe time has tainted my view. But Departments continue to function. Can Departments continue to make announcements and do press releases? Admittedly, you are not going to announce the annexation of Eritrea—hopefully Parliament would be recalled for that—but stuff still happens and that prompts questions.
As a Minister, you would probably rather dial down people’s ability to ask any form of question during the recess. I would have had the same view when I was a Minister, but as a parliamentarian I would say that the questions still need answering. Isn’t the best and most sensible way to look at a means for parliamentarians to ask questions, but also for the Department to get the questions? Perhaps if I table a question on day two of parliamentary recess, you could get that question on at least day three, but then answer it two weeks later. There would then be a smoothing out of questions—as against the current system, in which you are right to say that you get them all in a tidal wave.
Could you get the questions, but be able to publish the answers in the usual run of things? You are right that people in the Department will be on holiday, as they would be in Parliament and everywhere else. Would that not make you more accountable to Parliament, as a Minister, and ensure that you do not have an enormous churn of additional questions all at once?
Seema Malhotra: Let me make a few points in response to that. First, that was a very helpful depiction of life in the Conservative party with the Whips Office.
Sir Gavin Williamson: Oh, that’s right—you cannot whip in your party.
Seema Malhotra: Well, I have been a Whip and there is whipping, as you know. I was trying to differentiate between what Government might continue to do as routine—announcements, press releases, visits and so on—versus the major announcements, which will more often be made during parliamentary Sessions. Parliamentary statements are an important part of that process.
In relation to what may happen through recess, you are absolutely right. It is a very important distinction: Parliament may be in recess, but Government carries on. That is absolutely the case. During the recess I will be in the Department—probably even more so than in the constituency, depending on the circumstances—and that is important; it is the Executive function.
In relation to questions, I am sure that that will be part of the work of the Committee in Parliament, particularly as to what might get answered and whether there are particular challenges during recess. There is also the point about being able to share the questions in a more timely way. At the very least, as a first step, that will make it much easier to get quality answers on day one of returning. There are definitely questions to look at around that.
You are absolutely right that anything can happen in recess, particularly on the international stage. Sometimes Parliament might be recalled, as we have seen, and it is important to keep the links between Government and Parliament responsive at all times. In the light of that, are there more questions to ask about the processes of scrutiny and whether or not it can wait until Parliament returns?
Q110 Katrina Murray: Thank you for coming along this afternoon; I have really enjoyed the part that I have been here for. You have seen the system operate from both a Government and an Opposition perspective. If you could change one aspect of the written parliamentary question system in the Commons, what would it be?
Seema Malhotra: I would probably say the reduction of duplicates and a stronger role for the Table Office. First, I would value that as a Member of Parliament if I were tabling questions, and secondly, on the Department’s side it is definitely worth looking at. That is something that I think has worked better in the past.
There may also be something about how we can refer to answers provided in the Lords. Maybe Aidan can say a bit more about this, but usually we can refer only to questions answered in the Commons. If a question has been very well answered by a colleague in the Lords, we in the Commons cannot do an “I refer to the parliamentary answer,” although that might be a common-sense response. It might be interesting to know if this was also raised in the Lords. We are the Houses of Parliament—can we look at the interface and make it a bit more effective?
Aidan Liddle: I think the rules on the information you can refer to in an answer to a PQ are even more restrictive in the Lords than in the Commons, but yes, you do not seem to be easily able to refer to material in the other House, which is obviously a bit restrictive.
Chair: As colleagues have no other questions, that brings us to the end of our session. Thank you both so much for your time this afternoon. If there is anything further that you would like to add, we will be very happy to receive it in writing.