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The Responsiveness Ranking: which departments reply to politicians and the public on time?

Which government departments are best at replying to requests for information? Gavin Freeguard constructs a hall of fame – and shame

Which government departments are best at replying to requests for information? Gavin Freeguard constructs a hall of fame – and shame.

Responding to requests for information is a big part of a government department’s work. Types of requests include:

  • Freedom of Information (FoI) requests, which can come from anyone
  • Written parliamentary questions (PQs), from MPs or Peers
  • Ministerial correspondence, in reply to letters from parliamentarians.

Looking at the most recent data in all three fields – FoI for the year Q2 2015 to Q1 2016, written parliamentary questions for the most recent session (2015-16), and ministerial correspondence for 2015 – we can rank departments on which are most and least likely to respond on time across all three types.

DfT, DfID and DH are the most responsive departments and the Scotland Office the least…

The Department for Transport tops our responsiveness ranking, with the Department of International Development in second and Department of Health third.

At the bottom of the table is the Scotland Office, with the Ministry of Justice, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the erstwhile Departments of Energy and Climate Change and for Business, Innovation and Skills completing the bottom five.

…despite DfT and DH having a reasonably high volume of requests.

The performance of DfT and especially DH is particularly impressive given the volume of requests they receive: DfT is ranked 2nd, 9th, 5th and 6th in volume of PQs, ministerial correspondence, FoI requests and in total respectively, while DH ranks 1st, 3rd, 8th and 3rd.

DWP – which receives the second greatest volume of requests overall – is a respectable 8th in terms of overall timeliness, with the Home Office – which has the greatest volume, largely thanks to its ministerial correspondence – is 13th. Less respectable is the Scotland Office’s performance – this small department has one of the lowest volumes of requests.

Most departments are relatively consistent in their timeliness in answering the different types of correspondence: the top five departments score 90% or higher across all three types. The bottom four – Scotland Office, MoJ, DCMS and DECC – particularly struggle with ministerial correspondence.

Timeliness is only one measure of performance in responding to requests for information. It is more difficult to measure the quality of responses, although MySociety has published some research on parliamentary questions based on its TheyWorkForYou site and the House of Commons Procedure Committee received 21 complaints during the 2015-16 session. On FoI, we can also see which departments are withholding most information in response to requests – usually Cabinet Office, HMRC and MoJ – although there may be good (and legally exempted) reasons for doing so.

Nonetheless, timeliness is a good indicator of how well departments are performing in something which many ministers care about – Jo Swinson, for example, told us that she ‘had a rule that Parliamentary questions would never be late’ and Simon Hughes that ‘it’s really important that we give timely answers to colleagues both public ones and in correspondence’.

We’ll see next summer whether ministers in the low-performing departments decide to prioritise their answers to correspondence in this way – and also how the new departments for International Trade, Exiting the European Union and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy fare.

Methodological note: In our analysis of ministerial correspondence data, we have applied our definition of departments and also consolidated some other categories, and therefore included some other bodies in the departmental total (HMCTS, NOMS and Office of the Public Guardian for MoJ; UK Visas & Immigration/Immigration Enforcement/Border Force for HO; and Child Maintenance Group, Human Resources and Director General for MoJ). The target response times bodies set themselves range from within 7 to 20 working days, and data is only published showing whether they answered within that target time, or not.

To come up with the overall ranking across PQs, ministerial correspondence and FoI, we added the individual ranks together and awarded the department with the lowest total first place, the second lowest total second place, etc, with the department with the highest total being awarded last place.

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