Written evidence submitted by Tan Dhesi MP (WRP 19)

What is the purpose and value of a Written Parliamentary Question, and what do Members of Parliament (or their staff) use them for? Has this changed over time?

Written Parliamentary Questions (WPQs) are an essential parliamentary tool for scrutinising the Government and holding it to account. As Erskine May notes, “the purpose of a question is to obtain information or press for action.” This encapsulates their formal constitutional role and the official position of the House. In day-to-day practice, however, for me and my team this definition serves as a foundation rather than a limit on how WPQs are used.

All of my WPQs either seek information or press for action, but within that framework they often serve a broader range of practical and strategic purposes. In particular, I and my staff use WPQs to:

• Support constituency casework, by raising issues of direct importance to my constituents and improving the quality, accuracy, and authority of the responses I am able to provide to them.
• Highlight issues of wider concern, whether specific to my constituency or of national significance, ensuring that they are formally raised with the relevant department.
• Draw issues to the attention of Government, by requiring officials to engage substantively with a topic and to produce an answer that is cleared by a Minister.
• Maintain focus on longer term or strategic issues, including national risks that may otherwise be crowded out by short term political pressures or the daily news cycle.
• Raise specialist, technical, or data heavy issues that are not well suited to Oral Parliamentary Questions (OPQs).
• Obtain more considered and detailed answers than would typically be possible through OPQs, by allowing Ministers and their departments time to assemble and consider fuller responses.
• Put the Government’s position on the record, creating an authoritative and citable statement that can be referred to subsequently, which is a useful tool for later scrutiny and holding them to account.
• Unlock blockages within the system, where prior correspondence or private engagement has not produced a satisfactory response.
• Identify and challenge inconsistencies in the Government’s approach, either across departments, within a department on competing policy areas, or over time.
• Demonstrate my engagement and interest in particular issues, providing transparency for constituents about the matters I am pursuing on their behalf.
• Enable breadth of scrutiny, through “round robin” questions that allow comparison of approaches across multiple departments.
• Enable depth of scrutiny, by examining a single issue in detail in a way that is not possible given the limited opportunities and time constraints associated with OPQs.
• Apply appropriate Parliamentary pressure by asking timely, awkward and/or difficult questions, with shorter deadlines (Named-day) on topics that the Government may prefer not to be asked, or to be asked later.

Overall, while WPQs may be less visible than OPQs, they are one of the primary means by which I discharge my responsibility to scrutinise the Government effectively and to hold it to account on behalf of my constituents. They are a fantastic tool that Members have in their toolbox.

What is the interaction between Written Parliamentary Questions 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 is a significant degree of overlap between WPQs and requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), in that both are tools for obtaining information from public authorities. However, for Members, they operate in materially different ways and serve distinct, albeit complementary, purposes.

Both mechanisms are valuable for scrutiny, but they differ in several important respects:

• Purpose and scope: Only WPQs can be used to press for action as well as to obtain information. FOIA requests are limited to the disclosure of recorded information and cannot be used to seek commitments or press for future actions.

• Coverage: FOIA requests can be submitted to a much wider range of public bodies than are directly answerable through WPQs, including arm’s length bodies, local authorities, and regulators. WPQs are largely limited to Government departments and Ministers accountable to Parliament, although questions asked to a Department about one of their Executive Agencies, can often prompt that agency to write to the Member with a substantive (but not public) response.

• Public accountability: Answers to WPQs are always published and placed in the public domain, with the responding Minister named. This creates a clear line of ministerial accountability that does not exist under FOIA, where responses are issued by officials and may not require ministerial sign off.

• Timeliness: From experience, WPQs are typically answered more quickly than FOIA requests, which are subject to statutory time limits but often require extensions or internal reviews.

• Visibility and scrutiny: WPQs and their answers are centrally published on Parliament’s website, making them easy to search and compare across departments, although the search function is somewhat limited. It is also far easier for Members to see what questions colleagues are asking and how the Government is responding. FOIA requests lack this collective visibility unless proactively published by the authority or disclosed elsewhere.

• Ability to refuse disclosure: Ministers generally cannot avoid responding to a WPQ which may be inconvenient or embarrassing, although answers may be partial or qualified. By contrast, FOIA provides a wide range of statutory exemptions and grounds for refusal, enabling public bodies to decline disclosure more readily.

• Procedural framework: FOIA requests are governed by legal duties, statutory exemptions, and appeals processes, whereas the obligation to answer WPQs is rooted in constitutional convention and parliamentary accountability rather than statute.

• Rules, constraints and protections: FOIA requests can seek information that would fall outside the House’s rules on orderliness or relevance for WPQs. Conversely, WPQs benefit from procedural safeguards that ensure answers are tied directly to ministerial responsibility, with both the question and answer protected by Parliamentary Privilege.

• Cost considerations: While responding to both WPQs and FOIA requests carries a cost to the public purse, MPs are never charged for tabling WPQs, whereas FOIA requests may incur fees. As I understand it, WPQs also have a higher threshold for having a response refused on the grounds of disproportionate cost.

For these reasons, WPQs and FOIA requests should be seen as complementary but distinct scrutiny tools rather than interchangeable ones. As a Member of Parliament, I make extensive use of WPQs, given their speed, visibility, and the level of ministerial accountability they provide. I rarely submit FOIA requests myself, and where I do, it is usually to bodies that fall outside the scope of parliamentary questioning.

What is the purpose behind the distinction between ‘Named Day’ and ‘Ordinary’ Written Parliamentary Questions and is that distinction still necessary?

The distinction between ‘Named Day’ and ‘Ordinary’ WPQs exists primarily to provide Members with a mechanism for seeking a prompter response where timeliness is important.

In formal terms, a Named Day question is one to which an answer is requested on a specific date. In practice, however, its principal purpose is more about signalling urgency and prioritisation. Compared with Ordinary WPQs, Named Day WPQs are generally intended to elicit a quicker response from the Government, particularly where the information sought is time‑sensitive or necessary to inform ongoing parliamentary or constituency work, or needed to maintain appropriate parliamentary pressure on an issue.

In my experience, this distinction broadly holds, and I make regular use of Named Day WPQs for precisely this reason: ensuring that my most urgent or pressing questions are highlighted as such and, in most cases, answered more quickly than they otherwise would be.

That said, the effectiveness of the distinction in practice ultimately depends on the responsiveness of the Government of the day. I have not reviewed recent statistics, and the following observations are therefore anecdotal and not made for party political purposes, but they illustrate the point. In the current Parliament, I have found that WPQs are generally answered promptly regardless of whether they are tabled as Named Day or Ordinary WPQs. By contrast, in the previous Parliament, my experience was largely the opposite: delays were frequent, chasing was often required, and while Named Day WPQs were sometimes answered more quickly than Ordinary ones, they were often not answered on their named day and there was no meaningful means of compelling Ministers to respond within the requested timeframe.

This highlights a key limitation of the distinction: although a Named Day WPQ is designed to prompt a faster response, compliance ultimately rests with the Government, and there is no easily enforceable mechanism to require an answer by a particular date. In circumstances where answers are consistently timely, the practical difference between question types can therefore become marginal; conversely, where answers are consistently delayed, the distinction can also lose much of its intended effect.

Nonetheless, despite these limitations, I believe the distinction remains valuable and should be retained. It provides Members with an established and recognised way to signal urgency, encourages better prioritisation within departments, reinforces the principle that some WPQs warrant a swifter response than others, and makes it easier for Members to challenge the Government on late responses by highlighting the date on which an answer to a Named-day question was due. Even where its impact varies depending on the level of government responsiveness, the existence of a Named Day mechanism continues to serve a useful procedural and signalling function within the House and aids in government scrutiny.

Are the limits on the number of Written Parliamentary Questions 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)?

On the whole, the current limits on the number of WPQs that Members can submit on any given day are appropriate and proportionate.

There are occasional circumstances in which greater flexibility would be helpful, most notably when submitting a “round robin” question to all Government Departments, which can exceed the standard daily limit of 20 questions available through MemberHub. However, I understand that this limit is not an absolute bar and where there is a need, Members retain the ability to table additional questions in person through the Table Office.

In general, the existing limit strikes a sensible balance between enabling effective parliamentary scrutiny and avoiding disproportionate demands on Government departments and the public purse. WPQs require significant civil service time to research, clear, and answer accurately. Constraints help ensure that this public resource is deployed in a focused and meaningful way, which provides an overall benefit to Parliament and the public.

I would also argue that some form of limit is a necessary safeguard against misuse. Without restrictions, there is a risk that WPQs could be deployed not to elicit information or press for action, but to deliberately overwhelm the Government of the day and distract from matters of genuine national importance. Such an approach would undermine the purpose of parliamentary scrutiny and would not be in the public interest.

Similarly, a daily cap encourages Members to exercise judgement and prioritisation when drafting questions. It incentivises careful thought about what information is genuinely required, rather than encouraging the submission of low‑value questions, including those designed primarily to inflate numerical metrics of activity rather than to achieve substantive scrutiny or accountability.

Just as I would not support Members being able to table an unlimited number of WPQs, equally I would discourage any attempts to reduce the limit of WPQs members could ask, as this would reduce the ability of Members to scrutinise the Government.

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

In my experience, the internal House processes and procedures for handling WPQs work well overall, and the support provided by the Table Office has been consistently professional, constructive, and of high value. I would particularly like to put on record my thanks to the Table Office staff for the support they have provided to me and my office during my time as a Member.

My experienced parliamentary team, who have a strong working knowledge of the rules governing WPQs, still regularly benefit from the advice and judgement of the clerks in the Table Office. This is especially valuable where questions involve complexity, novelty, or sit close to the margins of what is permissible under the House’s rules but nevertheless raise issues of clear public interest. In these circumstances, the Table Office plays a vital role in enabling effective parliamentary scrutiny, while ensuring the rules of the House are adhered to.

I and my team also greatly value the open‑minded approach taken by Table Office staff when dealing with carded questions. In most cases, the reasons for a question being carded are well founded, and my team will either amend the wording or withdraw the question entirely. However, there are occasions where we take a different view on whether a question is orderly. In those cases, the Table Office has consistently been willing to engage in detailed discussion, consider our arguments carefully, and where appropriate, accept that a question is in order and allow it to be tabled. Equally, there are occasions where discussion leads my team to accept that the Table Office’s initial judgement was correct, or a revision is agreed. It is rare for such discussions to conclude with an unresolved disagreement, and I regard this as evidence of a confident, professional, and intellectually robust team. This willingness both to defend a position and to revise it where necessary is of significant value to Members and to the House as a whole.

Having said this, there have been several occasions where the Table Office’s interpretation of orderliness can feel overly cautious, and at times this caution appears to align more closely with shielding the Government from difficult lines of questioning than with enabling the fullest possible scrutiny. While I recognise the need for consistency and procedural discipline, there is a risk that an overly defensive approach can unintentionally narrow the scope of legitimate parliamentary inquiry.

I would struggle to point to a single, definitive example of this, but I have encountered it on a number of occasions during my years as a Member. One scenario which has cropped up on a few occasions is where I have been asked by the Table Office whether I know if the Government already holds a particular piece of information, in the context of a WPQ that is explicitly seeking to establish whether the Government holds that information in the first place. Because I am not in a position to confirm the existence of the information, which is precisely the purpose of the question, the question is then ruled to not be orderly. While having a basis for a question is important, Members should not be expected to know the answers to their questions before they are allowed to ask them.

More recently, I have noticed a reduction in the level of service that the Table Office is able to provide. Questions are no longer routinely sub‑edited to the same standard, nor consistently formatted to established House style. I understand that this reflects a deliberate operational decision intended to manage an increased volume of WPQs, which have reached record levels. However, the practical effect is that Members and their staff can be less confident that the same level of procedural support is being provided as in previous years.

If the Table Office is under sustained pressure as a result of higher workloads, then this points to a resourcing issue rather than a procedural one. There are limits to how far increased demand can be absorbed without additional capacity, and in my view consideration should be given to providing the Table Office with further staffing or support. Investing in adequate resourcing would help maintain service standards, procedural expertise (which is vital), strong subject knowledge and ensure that the WPQ system continues to operate both efficiently and to the benefit of effective parliamentary scrutiny.

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

Overall, departmental processes for handling WPQs appear to be working reasonably well, though performance does vary by department.

In my experience, most departments provide timely responses, and the quality of answers is generally average to above average. While answers do not always address every aspect of the question in the way I might prefer, or provide the level of candour sought, that is an inherent feature of political and ministerial accountability rather than necessarily a failure of process, and I am not convinced any procedural changes could address that.

The main exception to the timeliness of responses are answers from the Department of Health and Social Care, which is chronically slow in responding to WPQs. However, I am mindful that this department receives a disproportionately high volume of questions compared with most others, reflecting both the scale of, and the sustained parliamentary interest in, health‑related issues.

One issue that arises across departments, although less noticeably in this Parliament than previously, is the practice of grouping several related questions into a single response. This approach can be entirely reasonable where the answer clearly and substantively addresses each of the questions being grouped. However, there are occasions where a grouped response fails to address one or more of the individual questions asked.

When this occurs, the impact on scrutiny can be significant. Grouping questions and then omitting a substantive answer to some of the questions being grouped can allow particularly difficult or inconvenient questions to go unanswered, while still technically recording that a response has been given. In practice, this also limits a Member’s ability to pursue the matter further, as re‑tabling the same question is likely to be either ruled out of order on the grounds of duplication by the Table Office, or elicit an answer from the Government which merely references the Member back to the earlier response that did not address the point in question. Either way, an orderly WPQ has gone effectively unanswered.

The Committee may wish to consider recommending an exception to questions being ruled out of order on the grounds of duplication in circumstances where a previously tabled question was included within a grouped answer but was not substantively addressed. This could be easily managed within existing processes, with the Table Office exercising their experienced judgement on this point, just as they do with every other decision on orderliness, and where the onus would be on the Member to clearly demonstrate that an answer to that specific question had not been substantively provided within the grouped answer.

April 2026