Written evidence submitted by Minister Seema Malhotra MP (Minister for the Indo-Pacific and Minister for Equalities at Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) (WRP 09)

In my capacity as the minister responsible for corporate issues at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), I am responding on behalf of the FCDO to the Procedure Committee’s review of Written Parliamentary Questions (WPQs). I have confined this response to the questions set out in the terms of reference where the FCDO is best able to contribute to the Committee’s deliberations.

Introduction:

In 2025, the FCDO received 6,092 WPQs, a 53 per cent increase from 2024 (3,994), and by a long distance the highest number received by the department in any single year.

Despite this increase in workload, the FCDO fell from second in the ranking of departments by volume of WPQs in 2024 to seventh in 2025, as other departments saw their volume increase by an even greater extent, as illustrated in the table below.

Overall, 90,331 WPQs were submitted in 2025, almost 84% up on 2024 (49,125), and more than three-quarters higher than the average of the previous ten years. The first two weeks of 2026 saw 4,790 WPQs, compared to 2,967 in 2025, an increase of 61%.

On a personal level, having witnessed this spike in the volume of WPQs in both the Home Office and the FCDO over the course of the past year, I can testify not just to the impact it has had on the workload of the ministers having to sign off every response, but also on the way the teams producing those responses have to allocate their time and resources.

In both departments, I had a number of occasions in 2025 when the progress I had asked civil servants to make on a particular live issue appeared to be delayed because members of the relevant team had been at full stretch answering WPQs on the subject. That deeply frustrating experience is one that has been echoed by every minister in every department I have spoken to about the increase in WPQ volumes in 2025.

I am aware of the recent speculation that some of this increase can be explained by the use of AI tools by Members or their researchers to generate much larger volumes of WPQs than would usually be normal, both on the minutiae of individual subjects and on a very broad sweep of all the key issues for which a department is responsible.

It will be for others to judge the accuracy of this speculation, but I will say from the perspective of the FCDO that we have seen a sharp increase in the number of questions which, on the surface, look far too detailed or far too generic to be of any use or interest to the Member of Parliament asking them, all submitted at once, and in bulk. However, as stated below, we do not believe that this is the only explanation of the rising volumes of WPQs, or the only problem that needs to be addressed in this area.

Responding to Terms of Reference:

2. What is the interaction between WPQs and the Freedom of Information Act 2000? Are there any other recent changes that have impacted on the ability of MPs to gain access to the same, or similar, information via other methods?

There are some issues under this umbrella which the Committee may want to examine, both in the interaction with the FOI Act and in other sources of information:

• Whatever the truth regarding the use of AI tools to generate WPQs, the FCDO is almost certainly seeing evidence of the use of AI to generate FOI requests, in particular through what looks like the automated scraping of transparency data to inundate the FCDO with identical requests for further detail on published lists of meetings, overseas trips, departmental expenditure, etc. This is adding considerably to the overall amount of resource that the department is having to devote to meeting requests for information, whether via FOIs, WPQs or ministerial correspondence.

• On many occasions, the FCDO will receive both a WPQ and an identical FOI request asking for a particular item of information or set of data. In that case, I would expect the same answer to be supplied in response to both queries, and indeed – if the WPQ is answered first – for the FOI response simply to point the requester to that publicly-available WPQ answer. There should never be a greater expectation of transparency, or a different threshold on what constitutes an accurate response, for an FOI request than for a WPQ, and it would be disrespectful towards Parliament if that were ever the case. If the Committee agrees, it would be useful to say so, so that the different civil service teams involved in processing WPQs and FOIs in each department know that their answers to identical requests are expected to be consistent.

• Besides FOIs, there are numerous items published by departments that would – if properly explored in advance – save MPs and Peers the time involved in submitting PQs and save departments the time involved in answering them. I would place these in two broad categories relevant to different types of PQ:

1. Existing sources of information and data, such as departmental annual reports, publications of workforce management information, contract documents arising from public procurement exercises, departmental transparency publications on external meetings, overseas travel, expenditure, etc., impact assessments, and HMT-published documents setting out departmental spending allocations; and

2. Existing statements of the government’s position on, actions in relation to, or latest assessment of, particular issues, such as written ministerial statements, ministerial contributions to relevant parliamentary debates, government press releases, ministerial speeches, letters to parliamentary committees, and – for the FCDO – joint statements made alongside international partners and statements by UK representatives in global fora such as the UN Security Council.

Straddling both these categories is the most widespread and obvious source from which many MPs and Peers could obtain the answers they are seeking through WPQs, which is the comprehensive stock of previous answers provided to very similar WPQs, easily available and searchable via the UK Parliament website. It is not clear what role the Committee can play in urging members to consult the existing sources available to them before submitting a WPQ, but it feels increasingly necessary that someone should do so.

In 2024, there were just 19 WPQs submitted to the FCDO which received an answer referring to previous answers, or other sources already available elsewhere. In 2025, that number rose to 681, part of a pattern across Whitehall which saw the number of WPQ answers referring to previously published information or statements rise from 1,427 in 2024 to 3,755 in 2025, an increase of 163 per cent.

4. Are the limits on the number of WPQs that Members of Parliament can submit on any given day appropriate? Are they comparable with the rules in place in other legislatures (both within the UK and internationally)?

I appreciate that some respondents to this inquiry will recommend moving to the system in the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments, or the parliaments in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, where there is no daily limit, but it is worth bearing in mind the other parliamentary systems where much tighter restrictions currently apply, for example:

- In Canada, an MP may have a maximum of four written questions on the Order Paper at any one time, and may request that the Government responds within 45 calendar days. Once a written question is answered, the MP can submit a new one to replace it;

-  In the European Parliament, each MEP may submit up to 20 written questions over a rolling three-month period, normally answered within six weeks. Each month, one question may be designated as a priority question, requiring a faster response.

- In France’s Assemblée Nationale, French deputies have a quota of questions that applies per legislative session rather than per day. Historically this has been a maximum of 52 questions per session, but the limit is reviewed and renewed by the Conference of Presidents at the start of each new session; and

- In Germany, Members of the Bundestag may submit up to four written questions per month to the government for written reply, to be answered within a week.

Personally, and on behalf of the FCDO, we do not recommend moving towards any of these more restrictive systems, but nor do we believe there is a case for moving to the other extreme, by removing the daily limit altogether. In particular, the combination of permitting Members to (i) ask unlimited numbers of questions, (ii) use AI tools to generate those questions, and (iii) ignore all existing sources of information, would bring the business of government to a standstill, and should not be considered lightly after a year when the number of WPQs submitted has smashed all previous records.

5. Are the internal House of Commons processes and procedures for processing and dealing with WPQs working effectively and efficiently? What changes, if any, may be needed to drive improvements?

According to Paragraph 22.19 of Erskine May, MPs may not use PQs to ask for information that is “readily available elsewhere (including in Hansard)” or which has previously been “provided or blocked / otherwise denied by the same Minister in the same session”. The evidence cited under Question 2 above would indicate that this rule is not being as rigidly enforced as it has been in the past, in that higher numbers of WPQs are now being successfully submitted to departments seeking information readily available elsewhere, or asking questions that have already been answered.

Looking at Paragraph 22.22 of Erskine May as well, stating that questions are inadmissible when they “seek the solution of hypothetical propositions”, “raise questions of policy too large to be dealt with in an answer to a question”, “are trivial, vague or meaningless”, or comprise “multiple questions on the same theme but with slight variations, which taken together take on the appearance of an argument or campaign”, the FCDO has seen repeated examples of WPQs in the past year, which belong in these categories and therefore should have been rejected if these rules were being enforced.

We can fully understand if, due to the huge increase in the number of WPQs that the Table Office are having to process, with no corresponding increase in resources, it is proving difficult for them to ‘police’ incoming questions as robustly as they did in the past and reject those which do not meet the rules. However, if that is the case, the Committee may want to consider encouraging government departments to cite these rules themselves when explaining why an answer cannot be provided to a particular WPQ, rather that assuming – as we tend to do at present – that because a WPQ has been accepted by the Table Office, it must receive a full answer.

One other issue that the Committee may wish to address – in the context of the overall workload facing government departments – are the arcane differences regarding the answers that may be submitted in response to House of Lords WPQs compared to those in the Commons. In particular, when a Peer submits a WPQ asking for factual information which has already been published and is readily available online, it seems nonsensical that departments cannot simply provide a link to that information, and instead need to reproduce it in full in their answers – often at great length – because of some outdated assumption that their Lordships cannot be expected to use the Internet.

Given that more WPQs are being received from the Lords, as well as the Commons, asking the government to provide data, assessments of situations, or statements of its position, that are already available elsewhere, it would be a very welcome and straightforward reform of the parliamentary procedures to simplify the means by which Peers can be referred to those existing sources of data, assessments and statements, whether that is providing a link to a GOV.UK website or the relevant Commons WPQ.

6. Are the processes and procedures for processing and dealing with WPQs in Departments working effectively and efficiently? What impact, if any, have these processes and procedures had on the quality and content of responses?

The FCDO’s Parliamentary Unit have performed admirably over the past year to cope with the increased workload from WPQs, alongside the various departmental teams responsible for producing draft responses for ministers to consider and sign off.

Despite those rising pressures, and thanks to the new Foreign Secretary’s personal instruction to prioritise the timeliness of PQ responses (as she had previously done at the Home Office), the FCDO succeeded in raising its rate of questions submitted on time to more than 80 per cent over the months of November and December, and the department has begun the new year in similar vein.

However, while that improved performance indicates greater efficiency in the FCDO’s internal processes, what it does not convey is the sharp increase in the amount of time that officials, ministers, and the parliamentary unit have had to spend on dealing with WPQs in 2025 compared to previous years, and the knock-on impact that is having on the time they have available for other priorities.

Conclusion:

I hope the Committee finds it helpful to have this perspective from one of the departments that has seen a sharp increase in its WPQ workload over the past year, and which has nevertheless invested considerable effort and resource in recent months into ensuring that a higher percentage of our incoming WPQs are responded to on time.

While we have so far succeeded in that effort, we are very clear that the trajectory we are seeing both in terms of the volume of WPQs, and the nature of the questions we are receiving, will make the workload for the department unsustainable over the medium-term. Whether that is a result of the increase in AI-generated WPQs, or the reduction in the number of WPQs ruled inadmissible by the Table Office, or simply a concerted effort by some opposition MPs to ‘gum the works’ of government, is a point for debate.

The WPQ system is a vital mechanism in supporting the role of Parliament in holding the Government to account. However, one thing is abundantly clear: the system of WPQs as it has existed for almost 200 years, as a means to obtain new and important information from the government, is being increasingly undermined by its treatment as a ‘numbers game’ by some members, interested solely in how many WPQs they can submit, rather than what answers they may receive. In that context, any move to relax the daily limit on WPQs at this time would be deeply ill-judged, whereas some of the changes I have suggested above under Question 5 would provide very welcome support to departments managing this workload, as well as enabling Parliament to remain effective in holding Government to account.

16 January 2026