Procedure Committee

Good afternoon and welcome to this public evidence session of the Procedure Committee. This afternoon we are continuing to take evidence for our inquiry into written parliamentary questions. We have previously taken valuable oral evidence from official Opposition and Liberal Democrat Front Benchers. Today’s session is therefore all about the experiences of Back Benchers and their views on the WPQs system. We are delighted that six Members of Parliament have graciously given up their time to speak with us today, starting with Ben Obese-Jecty. Before we begin, please will you introduce yourself for the record?

I am Benjamin Obese-Jecty, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Huntingdon.

Thank you very much. How do you go about using WPQs in your work, and to what end do you rely on WPQs?

I have found WPQs to be an incredible source and resource for information. Given the number of new Members who came to Parliament in 2024, it is very competitive to get your voice heard in the Chamber or to get an opportunity to ask a Minister a question, particularly via OPQs. We found that my success rate at applying for OPQs is something like a 95% failure rate. Given that OPQs are few and far between, and very often you will be at the tail end of the order—I think I was No. 18 on the Order Paper yesterday—you know that your substantive question will not be asked. Written parliamentary questions are useful for me as a more immediate way of being able to get a response and knowing that I will get a ministerial response that will be on the record. Named day questions are particularly useful to be able to line up in advance of a potential OPQ. If you have put in for an OPQ, you might get one or you might be successful in bobbing for one, but it is useful to have an idea of what the Minister is likely to answer to a specific question. From my perspective, WPQs are also very useful in preparing for debates, particularly on technical subjects. For example, we recently had a debate on the use of animals in scientific research, and I was able to ask a plethora of questions about the animals in research science strategy. That is not an area that I am particularly expert in, but those questions were very useful to drill down into the progress that has been made on some of the various milestones that sit within that document, and to flesh out the information that I used in my speech. I have also found WPQs incredibly useful for broadening my knowledge of various subject matter areas. I enjoy finding out a bit more about things that look interesting—sometimes it is just as simple as that.

Thanks very much for that response, Ben. It has been widely reported that you have submitted more written parliamentary questions than any other Member. How on earth have you managed to do that and to manage that workload? Also, what value do you get from the responses?

I have a notes page on my phone with headings for each Department, and as and when something comes up in the news or gets mentioned in Parliament that is of particular interest, I will make a note and come back to it later. Also, I work as a PPS across two Departments, so when a new document comes up, I will read through it and jot down questions as I am going. It then becomes very simple to put those in via the portal. I note, by the way, that the portal has suddenly stopped working on my mobile phone. I do not know whether it is just my mobile phone; it did coincide with me being outed as the MP who asked the most questions, so I do not know whether there is some sort of block going on. That remains to be seen. It is useful, and I read all the answers and file a lot of pursuants off the back of them. Very often you will tug on a bit of string and actually you will get quite a lot of string back, and you can ask a number of pursuants off that and take it off in different directions. That is really useful. In terms of the value of the answers, it very much depends on the Department. I am a shadow MOD PPS, so the majority of my questions go to the Ministry of Defence. I get quite useful answers back from the MOD. There is something of a tête-à-tête between myself and the Minister for Defence Procurement. He knows when he can tell me something, when it is likely to open the door to more questions and when he obviously cannot for operational reasons. That is fair enough. Other Departments—I will name the FCDO as probably the worst offender—simply do not give you any information. That transfers as far as drilling down into that question and being referred back to a previous question, which in itself was a reference back to a previous question. That leaves you chasing your tail back three or four questions to find out that they did not give you an answer in the first place, and that is the one that they are referring you back to. To be given the same answer if you put in an FOI means that they are simply avoiding scrutiny on that topic. I would absolutely out the Minister for the Overseas Territories as the single worst offender for not answering questions.

Thank you. Do you consider that the sheer quantity of questions might strain the WPQs system?

I am well aware that the quantity of questions, even probably just those that I ask, places a strain on the system. I know that the Clerks have to put together the Order Papers and table all the written and oral questions that come in, and I appreciate that they work on a skeleton crew. I have had a number of meetings with Dr Davies about this, in terms of the strain that it places on the system and their inability to cope with such a high quantity of questions. I have sympathy for that, but at the same time I do think that the situation has probably changed from the last Parliament, when there were lots of MPs who potentially did not use the tool in that way. Now we have not just me but probably some of the other people who you are going to speak to over the course of this session who are putting in vastly more questions than people have done previously. As a result of that, the resourcing of the Table Office probably needs to be looked at—whether one or two extra heads might take the pressure off—because I do not think the number of questions is going to ease up, and that is probably something that they are going to have to either adjust to or resource better.

Thanks, Ben. Do you use AI, either to draft questions or to analyse the responses?

I do not use AI at all. I do not use AI in the formulation of questions. I have obviously tabled quite a lot of questions, and I have had a lot of rejections back as well, but I have now learned the language that the Table Office like to write questions in, to the extent that it is actually just quicker for me to write a question out manually than it would be to teach a large language model to replicate that language. Given that so many come back, it is just quicker for me to go back to them and say, “Could you tweak this part to ask the question in this way?” That usually gets it through. If there were a system where you could effectively teach a robot to put the questions in through the portal, it would probably be something that a lot of people would use, but given that you have to do everything manually, I find—or I did find, certainly—that asking questions from my mobile phone was simply a case of cutting the questions from my notes and pasting them into the portal. On analysing the answers, you can read through some and say, “That’s a non-answer—no need to interrogate it.” Sometimes, when the answer mentions a specific programme or project, it is just a case of tabling a pursuant asking, “What is that project?” I do not think you would necessarily get any benefit from using AI to read through it.

As MPs we all have our staffing budgets, and we all have teams of people who help us to do our jobs. Do you feel that you have to allocate extra bodies to manage the written questions bit of your work? Does it take resource away from doing casework? That is certainly how I would feel. If I was putting in the number of questions that you were, I would have to sacrifice doing casework for my constituents.

I am very lucky that I have a very good caseworker. I run quite a lean team; I have a chief of staff, a senior parliamentary assistant, a caseworker and a researcher, and I am also currently lucky enough to have an intern. I do all the written questions myself, and I also do all my own oral questions, so that is just not how the team is set up. They have never done the questions for me, which is probably because I have quite specific interests that I want to drill down on, and I do not think they are necessarily tuned into what I would think was interesting. I am certainly not interested in reading the answers to questions that I am not interested in, amid all the questions that I have put in. The casework is very much something that is handled by the team, and the system works pretty well at the moment, so I have never had to rely on them.

I believe that our terms of reference have been shared with you. Is there anything further that you would like to add in relation to those?

There is a lot of scrutiny on written questions at the moment because people are putting in very high numbers, and there are high numbers overall. I have found that they have been a gold mine, not only for the information that comes back from Ministers, but for the fact that you can get a response from a Minister in as little as four days. If you write to a Minister, you might be lucky to get a response. If you have to wait for a question in the Chamber, you can wait an awfully long time for an OPQ to come up and then not get an answer in the Chamber. I think it very much shortcuts the process. Obviously, I was not here before 2024, but it feels like politics is now very immediate. People have short attention spans and they want answers right now. Whether it is a constituent who wants a response, and you are submitting a question to get them an answer on what is going on with the local roundabout, or it is a grand geopolitical question, the fact that you can get answers so quickly allows us to keep pace with the constant churn of the new cycle of constituents’ demands. I think that politics has probably changed, and the WPQ system is probably ever so slightly out of date. For example, having spoken to the Clerks, I know that the system has the 20-question limit because that was how it was designed. Even if you put in 100 questions and give them in manually, they can upload only 20 a day, because of how the system works, so there is probably some work that needs to be done to slightly modernise the WPQs system. Clearly, it is not perfect, but it certainly is not a catastrophe. Apart from the annoyance of people having questions rejected, on which the Table Office can be slightly overzealous—I am sure you will hear more about that from other Members—I think it is a useful tool overall. I would be quite irritated if it was watered down and the numbers were reduced. Ultimately, it is a very good tool for holding the Government to account, and although it would do me a disservice, I would probably encourage more Members to use it to their advantage.

I am not seeing any Committee members indicating that they would like to follow up, so thank you very much for that helpful evidence, Ben. If you wish to add anything further on the inquiry, please send it in writing to the Clerks, who will make sure that we see it promptly. Examination of witness Witness: Charlie Dewhirst MP.

I am delighted to welcome Charlie Dewhirst MP. Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself for the record?

I am Charlie Dewhirst, Conservative Member of Parliament for Bridlington and The Wolds. For full disclosure, I am also a member of the shadow Cabinet Office team and shadow Northern Ireland Office team as PPS to Alex Burghart. I should also point out that I worked here for a Member of Parliament between 2005 and 2008 and therefore had experience tabling questions back then. I also responded to questions in relation to elite sport during my time at UK Sport between 2011 and 2014.

Hi Charlie. Thanks for coming along. I do not know whether you heard our questions to Ben, but some of our questions to you will be the same. In terms of the purpose and value of written parliamentary questions, how do you go about using them in your work, and to what end do you rely on them?

They are a very important tool, particularly for those of us in Opposition parties, for holding the Government to account and accessing information that would not otherwise be available to us. It is a vital tool that we have as Members to access that sort of information. It has been frustrating since I was elected in July 2024; it certainly feels very different from the situation 20 years ago, when questions certainly were not carded as regularly as they are now. I do not know whether that has come as a result of guidance, whether the systems in place flag things up, or what has changed during that time, but it feels to me sometimes as though the Table Office is creating its own work and causing itself to be overloaded by the carding of questions. The reasons why questions get carded—I am happy to give some examples—are sometimes slightly silly. Take a simple example: asking if the Attorney General had been involved in any of the Chagos negotiations. I was asked for a basis for that—could I provide proof that they had been? If I had proof, I would not have asked the question, and it would have been out of order anyway because the information would have been readily available. These are the kinds of things that you come across that drive you slightly mad as a Member of Parliament and increase the frustration that a lot of us feel at the moment with the way in which this operates.

What improvements would you like to see in the way both the House and the Government deal with written questions?

The Table Office need to be encouraged, perhaps, to let a lot of questions through to the next part of the chain. There can always be pushback from Departments—from those who are answering the questions—if they feel a question is unreasonable, if they do not hold the information or if it has gone to the wrong person, as occasionally happens. The bar has been set almost too high now. It is almost like the burden of proof has been put back on to the Members of Parliament: “Why are you asking this question?” We had another farcical one where I was asked for the basis, so we put in the link to a media story that clearly showed photos relating to the question we were asking, but I was told that was not a basis to ask the question. Clearly, that is ridiculous, so there needs to be a change in policy within the Table Office to make sure that we can get these questions through. It would actually help them, I think, because so much of their time is taken checking, querying and going back and forth between offices, which is not helping anybody.

Do you think Government Departments deal with written parliamentary questions respectfully?

There is a bit of a mix; it is not a uniform approach. You do find that different Departments are more forthcoming than others with information. Some clearly hold things quite close to the chest, and it can be more challenging. One example of where there is a real issue here is when a written question tabled by a Member of Parliament is rejected or not answered—so we do not get the information—and yet the information is provided in full when a freedom information request is made. What really is the purpose of us having the facility to ask written questions when we can just stick in FOIs? Sometimes, those FOIs are answered in a timelier fashion than the written questions. I think that is why you get so many named day questions and everything else—because people feel they are not going get an answer if they just put it in without that facility.

Thanks, Charlie. I will put the same question to you that I put to Ben: do you use AI at all for drafting or analysis?

I am a bit of a luddite on AI, I am afraid; I do not use it for anything. The point of the questions we are asking is that there is a theme and a reason why we are pushing, with pursuants and everything else. Perhaps I am not technologically advanced enough to do it, but AI perhaps would not help me in that sense, unless I was just looking to farm questions. If you do not know the answer, but you think there is something there and you are trying to unearth it, I am not sure whether AI would necessarily support you in that. In terms of monitoring the responses, that is a spreadsheet job.

So you do not allocate more resource within your team to deal with submissions or answers.

I maybe do not put in as many questions as the previous witness, although I still put in a reasonable number, but what is wasting a lot of time is the unnecessary querying. I will give another example of a shadow team issue that we have had. Often, we get to departmental questions and certain issues have not gone away in the previous six weeks. We might therefore look to table similar questions on an issue where, six weeks prior, a question was accepted by the Table Office as perfectly in order. But something has happened in that six weeks—or, actually, I do not think anything has happened; I think what has happened is that a different person has looked at the question and decided that it is not in order. So there is a lack of consistency there as well, which needs to be addressed. These are not massively controversial questions. They are often quite simple things, so I struggle to understand why this has happened.

It should not be for me to give evidence but I will share this: I had an example where I submitted a question five minutes before the deadline and it was accepted. The exact same question had been submitted four days before the deadline and it was queried. I asked why the previous question had been queried and was told that, because the later question was submitted so close to the deadline, it had probably been accepted on that basis. That does not suggest there is always consistency.

No. There is a lack of consistency across the board. I would be frustrated if I were on the other side in the Table Office, because there is this problem where they are not allowing the flow of questions through that they should be. If they did, they might find they could spend their time properly querying the questions that need to be queried.

Is there anything else you want to add?

No. I know this issue came to light probably around six months after the last election, certainly from my perspective. I know that the Speaker has issued guidance to try to encourage a slight change in the way of working. It does not appear to have changed in any way; the situation has not got any better. I hope the Committee can make some thoughtful recommendations on how we go forward with this, to ensure that those of us, as individual Members of Parliament, can use the facility of questions, as they should be, to hold the Government to account.

I have one follow-up, similar to the question asked on the previous panel. You mentioned that you might not put in quite as many WPQs, but it is still a significant amount, and you talked about the functioning of the system. Do you have any thoughts on whether the quantity of WPQs going into and through the system might be placing strain on it and causing some of the problems?

I suspect that the fact that the system now exists as an online portal makes the tabling of questions much easier. You do not have to print off a paper copy and take it to the Table Office as you used to. That would encourage more questions, particularly during recess periods, when you can still crack on and do that without any particular limit. If there is a resourcing issue within the Table Office, that needs to be addressed, rather than trying to curtail the ability of MPs to hold the Government to account. That would be a more sensible solution than saying, “There are too many questions—you shouldn’t table them.”

Thank you. I am not seeing any further follow-up questions. Charlie, thank you very much for your evidence. Once again, I see that our next panellist is ready and waiting, so we will seamlessly transition. Examination of witness Witness: Edward Morello MP.

I am delighted to welcome our next witness, Edward Morello MP. Once again, before we begin, may I ask you to introduce yourself for the record?

My name is Edward Morello. I am the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for West Dorset. I was elected in 2024.

Good afternoon, Edward. Can you tell us a bit about how you use written questions to do your work, please?

First of all, the Committee should have called my chief of staff and not me, because they do most of the written questions, so we had a long discussion before this. We use them predominantly in two ways. One is because we are trying to find something out. That may be for the purpose of informing a question or a speech, to go into a debate, to follow something up, or to get the basis of information that we need in order to make an ask. It might be that we are trying to uncover whether a policy area is worth pursuing, because we want to establish whether the Department is already doing something about it. The other element, which I think Ben Obese-Jecty alluded to in his evidence, is the fact that you cannot be everywhere doing everything. There is a lot of this job that is performative and a time sink: sitting in the Chamber for three hours, bobbing in the hope that you get called, or in the lottery and ballot that is oral questions. That means that we need to be doing other, effective things for our constituents. Written questions, similar to early-day motions, are actually a way of doing stuff on the issues that constituents might be contacting us about. We can actually go out and ask those questions, or try to assist constituents in uncovering some information, and get back to them and say, “Look, we’ve done this, and we’ve done it very quickly, and we’ve actually done a lot on this.” When somebody then contacts us again and says, “What are you doing on”—insert obscure issue here; I think we had one the other day on insurance for thatched buildings in the face of fire station closures—we can get a load of questions in, find out some information and come back and say, “Okay, we’ve uncovered this,” and either, “Actually, you don’t need to have concerns,” or, “You might want to have concerns, but we’re going to do this on the subject.” Through that, we can very quickly go back to a constituent demonstrating action on something, because I don’t know how long I would have to wait to be able to shoehorn thatched buildings and fire closures into a debate in Westminster Hall or the Chamber.

Why don’t you use the Library for those types of research and casework queries? From my perspective, I might have contacted the Library to get a more immediate response. Sometimes you will also get a more candid response because, as you will know, the Library can get informal steers from the Department, while a written question would not get you that same angle.

Yes, we do that as well. Absolutely, there are multiple facets to it. For example, we had a conversation in my office the other day about renewable energy and decoupling gas prices from wholesale energy prices. I had read a proposal in a paper that said, “Actually, there are a number of options here.” We went to the Library, but we also put in a number of questions. We put those in the correct written question language, but what we were trying to establish was, “Are you actually looking at any of these things?”, because we don’t want to start going down the line and saying, “What are you going to do about this?” when in fact they might already be doing something. What we are trying to do with written questions is not always unhelpful; we might be trying to avoid wasting a Department’s time by pursuing stuff that they are already doing.

Thank you. I will ask you the same question I put to other colleagues on AI: do you use AI?

I just want to know, John, have you actually uncovered any basis for this outrageous Government claim that we are all using AI? Given all the people you have asked, has there been any evidence?

Well, I—

I am just going to cut that off; we’re asking you questions.

Sorry, Chair.

Let’s get back to the asking of questions and the providing of evidence.

I shall put in a written question asking whether there is any evidence of AI use. I agree with Ben’s point: it would probably take longer to write the prompt for AI than to just table the question. We don’t use it—I mean, I don’t even know how to use it, but we do not use it in my office in any function whatsoever.

Is that a policy decision that you have taken? Certainly, in the last six months, I have started using AI much more. I did not use it at all previously, but now I see the power of it, and I think it can be harnessed to good effect; it can perhaps make our work more efficient and help the Table Office as well. Have you taken a policy decision that you will never use AI, or do you see yourself using it in the future?

It is not a policy decision. I don’t think we particularly have the skillset in my office. I hired from departing MPs’ offices, so most of them had a way of doing stuff that I was able to rely on and feel confident in. I am sure there will come a point when we may start deploying it in some way, shape or form, but, at the moment, we don’t have the skillset.

Are there any aspects of the WPQs system that you would like to see improved? That could range from the tabling experience right through to how the Government handle WPQs and respond, and how Departments get back.

I think that is a very good question. Undoubtedly, more resource in the Table Office would be to its benefit. There is a risk here of sort of boxes and gases—that you just end up creating space for more written questions—but I certainly think that its capacity could be improved. Despite the fact that, apparently, I have tabled 1,700 written questions since I was elected—I did check before I came in here—we are actually averaging only about 20 a week, so we are not even anywhere close, or even in the race, compared with Ben. We are not even close to the weekly limit. We do more during recess, probably because my chief of staff, who is also my parliamentary assistant and does speechwriting and stuff like that, has more capacity for doing written questions then, and we might want to fill the gap left by the fact that I do not have opportunities to speak in the Chamber, or to pick up policy issues that we not have had an opportunity to work on. Even then, we are only doing 40 a week during recess, but—I will bow to your superior knowledge on this—my understanding is that the Table Office cannot look at questions during recess and neither can Departments. While we are all off with more time to do written questions, all we are doing is creating a massive backlog, and then they come back to work and have this enormous pile on their desk that they have to try to work through, which is a maddening system. They should be able to look at written questions and Departments should be able to respond to them during recess. I think that would be helpful, purely from a logistics perspective. I do not know whether increasing or decreasing the total number that you can do would really change things significantly. I do not know how many MPs are actually hitting that threshold.

You mentioned that you might not be quite in the same race as previous panellists, but you still put in a significant number of written parliamentary questions. Do you think that places any strain on the system through sheer quantity itself?

The risk with all these things is that you just displace where the pressure is. If you suddenly start saying that you cannot do written questions or limiting the number of them, the risk is that MPs will just start writing more letters to Ministers and then Ministers will have to spend their entire time responding to those, or that MPs will do more FOIs, which again will just be a different kind of pressure on Departments. I do not know that any fundamental change in written questions would be useful. The quality of responses has been raised already. If you do not want to answer the question, then you do not answer the spirit of the question. We quite often find ourselves putting in extremely similar questions to try to elicit an answer, whereas everyone could have been saved a lot of time if the Department had responded to the spirit of the question rather than the specifics thereof. I go back to my earlier point, which is that the purpose is not to be unhelpful. We are trying to make Government more effective. We are trying to make policy recommendations that are useful. We are trying to be the voice of our constituents and there has to be a medium for doing that. Written questions are an extremely effective way of doing it.

As you came into your role, was there any best practice guidance or training given to you or your team about the conditions or environment in which it would be best to use a WPQ versus using the Commons Library or writing to the Department? Have you done any training, or are you aware of any guidance?

I am almost certain there is some guidance and that I had it explained to me in depth, on the first day, when I was being shown around Parliament and where the toilets were, and when I had to get a computer and everything else. I am not sure I necessarily retained it, as many people did not in that first 24 hours. I did hire from departing MPs’ offices, so there was already some institutional knowledge about best practice. Like a lot of the new intake—it is interesting that the highest numbers seem to be among the newest intake—I had that rapid realisation about what levers you have to pull, what is useful, what gets stuff done and what is a useful use of your time. I go back to this point of bobbing in the Chamber for three hours in the hope of getting a one-minute time-limited speech, and then not getting a specific answer to your question. It does not always feel like the most effective way to do stuff. It might be great for the socials, but are you moving the dial? Certainly, this intake has come in and said, “We’ve got to do stuff differently. We’ve had a large-scale change in the number of MPs. We’re going to be in at 9 o’clock. We’re going to be busy. We’re going to be doing all this stuff. We’re going to make sure that constituents are getting value for money.” There is almost certainly more demand from constituents for you to be doing this stuff. They contact us about everything under the sun. I had in the same day a question on the defence of the Falklands and on something to do with renewable energy. It is everything in between, down to potholes and all that kind of stuff. Written questions are a way to respond to what your constituents are asking you to be busy about.

Do you find that the evasiveness of some Departments almost creates extra work? You touched on the fact that sometimes—you did not say this, but I have noticed it—there has been a deliberate mis-answering of the question that then causes you to have to go back. Do you find that often happens?

I have to be careful about attributing effect and cause and confusing those two things, because I recognise that sometimes you are asking a question and it might be a named day question that requires a Department to go several rungs down. I might be trying to find out something about dentistry in West Dorset, and that has to go quite far down the chain before the Department can come back to me with an answer. There might be legitimate reasons why an answer is vague or feels elusive but you can get a response that you read and go, “That’s a non-answer.” But you also want to find out the information, so you might go back with a variation thereof. On attempt three or four, if we land by pure luck on the correct wording and suddenly get a response, that tells me we all could have saved ourselves a lot of time.

Do you think there is a pattern of behaviour? Are certain Departments better than others, and some worse than others?

I respect the fact that quite often the FCDO and the MOD will not be able to give you an answer. That does not mean you are wrong to ask the question. There might be another way of eliciting that information. I will be honest: I think it is pot luck who you have responding to it and how many questions they have had to deal with that week, and how many of them are the same and how experienced they are. I think there are probably 101 reasons. If you took a straw poll of worst performing Departments, you would probably get the same answers across Parliament.

You have had the terms of reference—this is the point where it feels like the weirdest job interview—so is there anything else that you want to bring to our attention that you have not been asked about?

Again, I made sure to speak to a number of staffers before appearing, to see whether there was anything that they felt was important, and they all wanted to praise the staff in the Table Office. They are extremely helpful and amenable, and get an enormous amount done under huge amounts of pressure. I would not want to think that any of my answers took away from their hard work. I have already raised allowing the Table Office and Departments to see questions during recess. I think that should be a fundamental change. You could lower the limit of questions, but I do not know how many MPs are actually hitting that. Removing the ability to table an unlimited amount during recess—so having a limit in recess—might be more helpful so that you do not create a massive backlog. One thing that came up, which means nothing to me, but might to you, is that Departments should not have to notify MPs by email of transfer between Departments. A notification on MemberHub is more than enough. That would take away admin from the Table Office and the Department, and generally MPs do not care where the answer comes from, so maybe that could be a useful takeaway.

Thank you very much, Edward, for that really helpful evidence. As I have said before, if there is anything further you want to submit to the inquiry, you are more than welcome to send further written submissions to the Clerks. Examination of witness Witness: Tessa Munt MP.

I am delighted to welcome our next witness, Tessa Munt MP. Before we begin, would you please introduce yourself for the record?

My name is Tessa Munt and I am the MP for Wells and Mendip Hills in Somerset.

Thank you very much for joining us. How do you go about using WPQs in your work and to what extent do you rely on the answers that you get from WPQs in that work?

I am very reliant on them. I have to say that—probably in common with any number of MPs—I have an idea of what the answer might be before I ask the question because I will have done my research beforehand, but I am very reliant on making sure that the Government are accurate in their answers.

Are there any aspects of the WPQs system that you would like to see improved? That may be from your experience of tabling the question through to how the Government responds to it.

Yes. There are a number of frustrations in the system as it exists. It is not perfect. If I may, I will refer to the notes that I brought because I want to use various examples. I have experience of Departments avoiding substantive answers. By that I mean that sometimes they will try to avoid answering by saying that information is publicly available. On a number of occasions, I have asked moderately detailed questions—they may appear to be the same question, but they relate to different periods of time, because I am tracking particular activity—and I am told to go to a link. Frankly, when I ask, for example, DEFRA—although this is not limited to that particular Department—about recycling waste tyres, recycling aluminium or anything else, it is the detail that is important. I then get referred to a link, and we have a really good go at looking at the link and trying to extract what is happening. I then have to use the House of Commons Library to interpret the data that it has sent over on the link. That may be an accepted form of doing things. I did not realise that—I have been here before this term—but when one has sometimes waited a very long time to get an answer it is quite annoying to get one that refers you to a piece of the Department’s website, and then you have to go to the House of Commons Library. I have to say that the House of Commons Library is absolutely fantastic, and maybe I should be asking my departmental questions to the House of Commons Library, but I did not think that was quite the point; I thought that the Department should be able to answer those questions itself. My conclusion would be that answers are often available but not without a significant amount of input from other people and other agencies—effectively the Library or my staff wading through yards of stuff. I have examples of that, which I am very happy to share with you. If I may, as an example, I will refer to some of the work that I have been doing with the Labour Member Jo Platt—I have not told her that I am going to mention her today. She and I have worked together on ME and long covid. I am the chair and she is the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ME, and we have between us filed quite a lot of questions to try to establish what on earth is going on and what preparations the Government have made in various areas. The Department of Health and Social Care is quite good at giving utterly irrelevant or non-response answers, I am afraid. I asked the Secretary of State, “what clinical criteria are under consideration for determining eligibility for any nationally prescribed specialised service for severe or very severe ME.” They wrote back to me and did not answer the question at all. They said: “Three factors determine whether a service is a prescribed specialised service”, and those are: “the number of individuals who require the service; the cost of providing the service; and the number of people able to provide the service”. There was nothing whatsoever that referred to the clinical criteria; they were just telling me that there is something in existence, somewhere. Jo Platt asked two questions on 14 November 2025, to which she received answers on 27 April. I do not think that is satisfactory when one is trying to move things forward on behalf of what the Government accept is a group of 400,000 people, but what we say is, at minimum, 1.3 million people who are affected by this issue. This is not okay. I am sorry to have to say that I think there are a number of parliamentary staff who feel that they are not treated as if they are speaking for me. If I ask my member of staff to do something or ask a question, I have usually sorted out the question on their behalf, and if I ask them to push back, they get fairly short shrift. That is unfortunate, to say the least. The staff provide information to back up the push-back against questions being carded. Effectively, I regard the information that I give to my team as them speaking for me, but they are not treated as if they are speaking for me, and I think that is pretty sad. I have heard words such as, “people are uppity” and “patronised”. That is not appropriate, perhaps, because they are effectively employed by us to work with us and for us. That would be my summary. If I may, can I stray into oral PQs, which eventually turn into—[Interruption.] Oh, go on, let me! All I will say is that I very often ask an oral PQ in the first instance. If I do not get balloted, that will turn into a written question.

I would say that you are free to submit further evidence in writing to the Clerks.

I will do that, shall I? Thank you.

If we focus a tight session on WPQs, that would be great.

Of course, that is absolutely fine. There are occasions when things are carded. I am told that some of my questions are argumentative and that I am not allowed to be argumentative, and I would say to you that I am never argumentative. I am seeking facts; I want data and I want to be able to back up what I am presupposing is happening or might happen at some point in the future. I disagree with the business of questions being deemed to be argumentative, and I do not think that it is a fair portrayal of what I am doing.

Do you use AI to draft questions or analyse responses?

Never.

Do you think it could be used?

I am sure that it could.

You mentioned the volume of data that sometimes comes back in a link; I think that you used the DEFRA example. My experience of AI is that it can be very good when you give it a wad of stuff and you want to get information from it or a summary. It is very good at grabbing the key stuff quickly. Do you think that that would be an option moving forward?

It is very sweet of you to suggest that, but no, because I need to be absolutely certain. It is the reason I do not just go wanging around the library or searching on the internet in the first place. What I want to see are the facts, and I want the data. I understand that I could use AI. Maybe, in a decade’s time, I will come to you and say that it is completely different—if I am still here. But I want to be absolutely certain, so I check everything myself anyway. I never use AI to propose or suggest questions. I do not do that. I think when I am driving and then I stop in a lay-by, write something down and file it the next working day. I do not use AI. I am sure that I probably could, but I don’t.

You gave the example of the Department of Health and those questions. When you have received quite an irrelevant answer, if you like, and you push back, that is when you find that your staff are sometimes not treated with the respect they deserve. Is that your final push?

No! No—I just keep going.

Then how do you follow up after you have had a useless answer, if you like?

Thank you for your question, but I do not stop until I have what I think is probably the answer. That has meant currying the Minister in the Tea Room and saying, “Come on, can I have an answer please?” Or we will go back again, again and again. I want to assure you that I have not asked questions that are so wide that I will get an answer that answers this bit but not that bit. I am focused on questions that are very specific; I believe that I am very specific on every occasion, because I would rather ask five questions focusing on different aspects of a particular thing than throw things into the air. I do not want to waste questions.

I understand that we have shared our terms of reference with you. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Hang on a minute—I read them. When I wrote this with my wonderful team, I think we covered pretty much everything. Quite often, if I know I am not going to be present at a particular ministerial questions session for some reason, I will use introductory questions. Very often, those are questions that have been pre-approved by our offices. The Lib Dem Whips, or our back-up to the Whips—I don’t know what they are called, but they are jolly nice people—will very often test-run those questions with the Table Office, so that we know we are okay asking them. I have had those carded, which I find completely remarkable when they are pre-approved—surely that just should not happen. There is then a bit of, “Oh, well, you know.”, but that is not okay. That would be the only other thing that I would want to contribute at this point.

Thank you very much. I am not seeing any further questions, but as I alluded to, if there is anything you wish to submit to the inquiry in writing, you are more than welcome to send it through to the Clerks. Examination of witness Witness: Neil Duncan-Jordan MP.

I am delighted to welcome Neil Duncan-Jordan MP. For the record, would you like to introduce yourself?

My name is Neil Duncan-Jordan, and I am the Labour MP for Poole in Dorset.

Hi, Neil. Thanks for coming, and thanks for coming early as well. My first question relates to the value of written parliamentary questions. How do you go about using them for your work, and to what extent do you rely on them in your day-to-day work?

Like some others in this room, I was a brand-new MP in July 2024, and I took to written questions really quickly—I love a written question. You have probably seen the list that I have put in over my time. It is not as many as some colleagues, I appreciate, but I am pretty assiduous. If I do not put in a question every day, I get withdrawal symptoms. I absolutely use them as a way of extracting information that I cannot get any other way. For example, when dealing with casework, issues will come up from my constituents and I will think, “Do you know what? I need a ministerial response.” Rather than writing to the Minister formally, I will stick in a question, and as far as the constituent is concerned, it is a ministerial response that comes back. It is not a headed notepaper, but it is the Minister’s name at the bottom of the answers. It covers that position, which is really helpful. The other really positive thing about them is that they are much quicker at turning around the answers to written questions. If I were to write to a Minister, for example, that would take much longer. If you are interested in getting stuff in and out pretty quickly, I find that they are really useful tool.

Are there any aspects of the WPQs system that you would like to see improved? I am thinking right from the very start, when you table your question, through to how the Government handle your answers, as well as everything in between and ranging across the whole process.

The tabling I find really easy. I think the system is good—as I said, I took to it easily and quickly. I found it very easy to use and a very good system. Sometimes the Table Office will come back and query some of my assertions or the questions that I am raising.

Hard to believe!

Hard to believe, indeed. “You can’t demand socialism overnight, Neil—you have to take a bit longer.” It would have been helpful, I think, to have had a little more guidance about how questions should be structured. I looked at what other people had done and copied it—I did not really have any training in doing that, but you use your initiative and that is how you put it together. Over time, you work out that if you have not had a decent answer, you can go back with the one that says, “Pursuant to this question,” but you learn all that on the job. Nobody taught me that, so having a bit more insight, training and background on that would have been quite useful. Some replies that you get back from the Table Office are about carded questions or questions that have already been asked before. They might say that yours are not suitable or suggest wording. I’ve found that the number of questions I get back these days that have an alternative suggested wording is getting lower and lower. At the beginning, very often the Table Office would say, “You can’t do this, but you can do that,” and I’d say, “Yeah, that is absolutely fine,” and nine times out of 10, I would go with the suggested redraft. Nowadays, I do not really get many of those coming through. I do not know whether that is me, or policy, or there has been a change of the system or the people dealing with them now look at things slightly differently. That is not that helpful, because when you just get a reply saying, “You can’t ask that question,” you automatically say, “Well, what can I ask? You haven’t given me that option.” Having that option would be quite helpful, as would having it a bit more rigorously applied. On the replies you get from the Ministers, I am probably not the first one to say that some of them are shockingly poor—not all; I wouldn’t go on record saying that they are all terrible because they are not. But some of them do not answer the question that you’ve asked. That is a bit difficult because if you are using the system as I am, to deal with constituents’ inquiries, and they have asked a specific question, and you have put that question forward but the answer you get is nothing like the question you asked, you can’t really use that answer. You then have to go back, and that is time-consuming—there’s a delay in getting back to the constituent and so on. I wouldn’t be able to say that there are serial offenders. One Minister does spring to mind, but I am not going to name them.

You made a point that I thought was very interesting, Neil. We understand that some Departments just can’t give a straight answer because of secrecy, but I almost got the impression that you feel that sometimes people are unnecessarily evasive. Do you think some Departments almost take the approach that it is a game?

I don’t know about a game; I have certainly had very few answers that come back and say, “I can’t tell you this because of secrecy.” That is not what’s happening to me. What’s happening to me is that the detail I am wanting or the questions I am asking are not actually being answered—not because of secrecy, but because of how the Department chooses to answer them. That is what I would say.

Thanks for coming along, Neil. It is good to get your perspective because when we have a look at our list of what are gently described as “high volume submitters”—

Frequent fliers.

They are predominantly Opposition MPs. How do you think that your perspective, as a Government Back-Bench MP, would differ from the perspective of an Opposition MP?

There was a suggestion when I first arrived—all of us who were new probably remember this, although it was two years ago—that it wasn’t a good idea to put in loads of questions because it clogs up the Government machine. That wasn’t the view I took, because I am using them for a different purpose. I am not using them to clog up the machine. I am not trying to bury the Government under a load of written questions. I am using them for casework. I am using them for constituents’ inquiries. I am using them for campaigning. I am using them to try and get information that I am then going to use in the Chamber. That is the practical side of the questioning system, I think, which is positive, and should be open to all of us. I don’t think there should be any restriction—“Oh, you can’t do this, because it is going to clog the machine up.” If I were an Opposition MP, my motivation might be different—I accept the point that you are making—but I can’t reflect on that, because I am not an Opposition MP. But I do not use them for the purpose of being difficult or to clog the system up. I use them for the very specific purposes that I have outlined.

Do you think that the motivation behind why you are using this vehicle is understood?

Understood by whom?

By Government Ministers.

You would have to ask them that. No one has ever come to me and said “Stop.” I take that as a positive thing. Maybe over time, people who started two years ago as new MPs put in loads and then it dropped off. That has not been the case with me. I have been absolutely consistent. No one has ever come to see me to say, “You need to stop doing this,” because it was a real pain and difficult and they couldn’t cope or there was a resource issue and so on. If they were to do that, we would have the discussion, obviously, but no one has.

I understand that our terms of reference have been shared with you. Is there anything further that you would like to add in relation to those terms?

No, not really. Just that—I have already mentioned this, but I will say it again—at the early stage, there was a sort of suggestion that it was not helpful to do this. I absolutely find this a really helpful process in getting data, in getting information and in getting ministerial replies that you can then pass on to your constituents. I think part of our role as Back Benchers is to advocate for our constituents and to get them the answers that they are seeking. We might not like the answers. We might not agree with the questions. That is not for me to decide. My role, I think, is to put those questions to the Government and then pass the answers back to the constituent. They can decide whether they like it or not. I’ve got my own views, of course, but I do not discriminate in that sense by saying, “Well, I am not going to ask that question because I don’t agree with it”. That is not the way I use the system. I use the system very widely to try and get answers for my constituents, and for me as well.

Thank you very much. I am not seeing any further questions, so Neil, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you. Hopefully that was positive and helpful.

Yes.

We wanted you to name a Minister—other people have done. Or a Department.

I am a little bit more discreet than that. I can tell the Chair later.

Let me just remind you that we are still public. If there is anything further you wish to submit in writing, you can do so through the Clerks for the inquiry. I see that our final panellist has joined us. Examination of witness Witness: Martin Wrigley MP

I am delighted to welcome our final witness, Martin Wrigley MP. Before we begin, would you like to introduce yourself for the record?

Thank you, Chair. I am Martin Wrigley, MP for Newton Abbot. I was elected in July 2024. It is an honour to be part of this process.

Thanks for coming along, Martin. The first question is about the purpose and value of written parliamentary questions. How do you go about using written parliamentary questions in your work, and to what end do you rely on them?

We use them extensively. You might have seen that I am quite high on the list—I think I am No. 3 on the list of people who use them extensively. What I really like about them is that when you have, say, an oral question in the house and you get the usual “Yes, no, maybe, but if, unless it’s Friday”-type answer—a non-responsive answer—you can follow up with written questions. You can actually pursue them to get to a point where the Minister will either answer or you can see that they are never going to answer. You can have that conversation through them to drill down into what you need to do. There are a few things I would like to see that would help and possibly reduce the volume of written questions. One is for a submitter of questions to be able to see what other questions had been submitted recently on the same thing they were asking about. It would be a fairly simple AI query to line up questions that are essentially similar or the same. If somebody else had asked the question, I probably would not want to ask it because I would already have the answer there. Then I could jump to the next stage of saying, “Following on from Sir Gavin Williamson’s question on Thursday 14th, would you please elaborate on this particular aspect of it?” That would save time at both ends and reduce volume considerably. It would also hopefully allow us to do some sort of reporting on those questions and to see the sorts of questions that people were asking about one of the topics that I am currently digging into—Palantir and the NHS. I suspect that many colleagues are also asking questions similar to mine, and I do not wish to waste ministerial time by having Ministers answer the same question 15 times. I want to stretch them and ask them 15 different questions.

You mentioned AI; one of our colleagues has asked this of previous panellists but unfortunately is not here. Do you make use of AI in your drafting collation or any part of your process in putting in WPQs?

I do not. I find AI is exceptionally good at summarising documents, giving me a three-minute version of a five-minute speech. That is absolutely fantastic. But creating new things? It is not creative. AI does not actually create anything new; it can only replicate what other people have written before. Arguably, you could say that is what humans do as well, having learned everything from somewhere, but I do not like to think that way.

You touched on this a little bit in your initial answer, but I will give you a chance to expand. Are there any aspects of the WPQs system that you would like to see improved? I am happy to look right from the point where you table them through to how the Government handle and respond to them.

I am not sure I see the purpose of named day questions, which we do not use very often. Questions are answered in reasonable timeframes, so I do not see the need for them. I can see that they might be particularly necessary if we have got something absolutely urgent, but normally with a written question you have enough time to put that in beforehand. I am not sure that named day questions particularly work as it stands. The reporting feature and, as I was saying earlier, being able to find out if other people had asked questions identical to mine would be extremely helpful. That is about it.

How do you find the process of actually putting them in and reading them all?

It is very straightforward. There is a bug in the oral questions system. When you click to submit a topical question, you then have to click that it is topical again within the body. But you do not have that bug in the written question system. I am a computer architect of 40 years, so I deal with systems easily.

I understand that the terms of reference of our inquiry were shared with you in advance. Is there anything in those terms of reference that you have not been asked about but would like to add?

I do not think so. I think you are looking at many of the right things. There was not anything that struck me other than the features that I have talked about to help us reduce duplication for the Ministers.

Thank you for that helpful evidence. As I have said to previous panellists, if there is anything else that you wish to submit in writing to the Clerks for the inquiry, you are more than welcome to do so.

May I add one thing? Having submitted well over 1,000 questions over the past year, I would like to thank the Table Office for going through all the questions and for all the work that they do behind the scenes. Without them, it would be very hard work. I would like to put on the record my thanks to all the staff who do that.

I am sure that will be noted and appreciated, so thank you. That brings us to the end of our final panel. We are grateful to all colleagues who have given evidence to the inquiry today and shared their views. Thank you all.