Written Parliamentary Questions
Monday, 12 October 2026
Contributions
Procedure Committee
Select Committee statement
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)Conservative
We now come to the first Select Committee statement. The Chair of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Cat Smith), will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which time no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of her statement, Members may ask questions on the subject of the statement. They must be brief questions, not full speeches.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab)Labour
The Procedure Committee has concluded its in-depth review of the written parliamentary questions system, and we were pleased to be able to publish our report just before the conference recess. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this statement, and I also thank current and former members of the Procedure Committee for their thoughtful consideration throughout the inquiry. My Committee regularly reviews the performance of Departments in answering written parliamentary questions, but there was a sense that a wider review was needed, because the written parliamentary questions system really was not working for Members. The number of questions had risen drastically, and the responses were not keeping pace or, indeed, meeting our expectations in terms of quality. Equally, we knew that the Government and the House administration were under pressure to deliver in a system that was at risk of being overwhelmed. We launched our inquiry in November 2025; we organised a survey of MPs, received written evidence, and heard in person from Opposition Front Benchers and groups of Back Benchers. I thank the many Members on both sides of the House who gave evidence to the Committee. We know that our colleagues are not always satisfied with Government responses to WPQs, and we also know that that feeling has increased as the number of WPQs has also increased sharply. We heard that there were frustrations among colleagues about a small number of MPs submitting a disproportionate number of questions, which could be construed as an abuse of the system. Members who make restrained and focused use of the WPQs system for their parliamentary work are, effectively, being adversely affected. The system, overall, needs to be based on a lower volume of input but a higher quality of output when it comes to responses from the Government. The flip side of our efforts is to alleviate some of the pressures in the system, but we think that MPs should expect better responses from the Government. We heard of concern about the tabling of some WPQs with limited Member involvement. We are clear about the fact that WPQs are a proceeding in Parliament, and should therefore always be initiated by elected Members. We cannot send our staff to speak in oral questions for us; nor should we expect our staff to table WPQs without our seeing them. At present, that is reflected by the need for our wet signatures on the hard-copy WPQs if we are to table them in that way at the Table Office. We believe that this should be reflected in the modern e-tabling system, and we recommend that Members be required to approve personally, in MemberHub, questions submitted by their staff. The fundamental e-tabling limit should remain at 20 per Member per sitting day, but limits should be introduced for recesses. It is, in our view, an anomaly that this limit applies in sitting times but not in recesses. Members will understandably wish to scrutinise developing events during a recess, but as WPQs submitted during recesses cannot be answered until the House returns, there is often a better way of doing this, such as corresponding directly with Ministers. We recommended a limit in recesses of 20 WPQs per Member for the first calendar week, and a further 10 for each additional full calendar week. In other words, the longer the recess, the more questions a Member will get. We remind Members that these are very much maximums, not targets to be hit, and that when we increase quantity, we may see a decline in quality. Moreover, looking busy by tabling more WPQs than the neighbouring MP is not an indication of how well someone is working as an MP. We also heard concerns about “carding”. We found that the process generally works well, but the terminology could be modernised. A card is not a red card, and it is not a block; it is merely a query that can generally be resolved very quickly if a Member nips into the Table Office. We recommended that carding be renamed “querying” to reflect that. When a Member accumulates a large number of unresolved queries—in old money, cards—at any one time, it creates a blockage in the system, and reduces the Table Office’s ability to advise other Members. When Members have 20 live unaddressed queries at any one time, they should be required to address those before submitting further WPQs. At present there is a cut-off time for same-day e-tabling of WPQs, but it is different on different days of the week, and it falls outside the normal working day. The Committee believes that a uniform time of 4 pm should be set between Mondays and Thursdays. That would be more straightforward for Members, and it would also mean that the focus of Table Office staff in the evenings, when far fewer staff are available, would rightly be on advising Members on matters such as motions and amendments for the following day, rather than marshalling WPQs. It would also allow questions to be considered over more time, thus supporting our goal of improving the consistency of colleagues’ experiences. Given the Friday sitting hours, we recommend that we retain the 2.30 pm cut-off on Fridays. Having an exceptional route to an urgent answer is very useful to Members, but we found that “named day” was a very confusing term for some. We thought that for the sake of modernisation, we could replace it with “priority questions”, which would better reflect the core purpose of a named-day question and would probably be simpler and easier for colleagues to understand. However, we recommend that the deadline for answers to priority questions be set automatically at three working days after tabling, which is the earliest that a Member can receive an answer to a named-day question. The limit for priority questions should remain unchanged at five per Member per sitting day. Colleagues should consider using an ordinary question to receive a detailed response, and using priority questions when speed is of the essence. We heard of a range of concerns about Government responses to WPQs from Members on both sides of the House. The Government should address those concerns, particularly by ensuring that questions are grouped sparingly and always individually addressed within a combined response. We recommend that references to information published elsewhere be used sparingly—there should be relevant extracts, not just hyperlinks—and that the Government communicate with Members and the Table Office when there is a block on questions on a particular topic. There should also be more transparency and accountability in the Government’s performance in answering WPQs. To that end, we have recommended that a public-facing dashboard be introduced on the parliamentary website, to be updated monthly, showing the performance of each Department in answering WPQs on time. That will empower Members, the public and even the press to pursue inadequate performance, and we hope that it will also help the Government to drive forward improvements. We recommend that Members consider how we use WPQs. We are best placed to decide, as individual elected representatives, when we need to ask a particular question, but we should also consider the cost to the public purse. There are many alternatives, including other parliamentary proceedings, ministerial correspondence, and the excellent services provided by the House of Commons Library, and sometimes we might actually obtain a better outcome from those. Artificial intelligence was an emerging theme in our inquiry, and we appreciate the concerns raised by Members. We are a forward-thinking Committee, and we see the benefit of AI in improving the processes, but we are more cautious about its use for content. It is most important for Members to check and remain responsible for their questions, and for Ministers to check and remain responsible for their answers. Ultimately, as we set out in the report, we recognise the importance of bringing the House with us, given the importance of WPQs to Members across the House. For that reason, we have recommended that the Government bring forward a motion endorsing the report as a whole. This would allow the House to endorse the report’s findings, recommendations and statements of principle, and allow the House administration, the Government and all of us to get on with implementing it. We hope that colleagues will support that motion when it comes before the House. We have overhauled the WPQ system in a modernising direction. Although we have not been able to take up every suggestion that was made to us, we have sought to give colleagues a better experience of WPQs and to make them a more valuable tool, including for the important function of scrutinising Government. Our Committee will review its findings and the implementation of the recommendations as we continue our regular work of monitoring departmental performance in answering WPQs. I commend this report to the House.
The hon. Lady has got off very lightly, since it seems that nobody wishes to ask her a question on that.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5413440.