Politicians and the public face a departmental lottery when it comes to which branch of Whitehall is the best at responding to requests for information, according to new research by the Institute for Government.
The Department of Transport is the top performing department, managing to deal with more than nine out of ten cases in a timely manner, the analysis of 19 major government departments shows.
The IfG's ‘Responsiveness Ranking’ draws on data for written parliamentary questions, Freedom of Information requests, and ministerial correspondence during the past year.
Freedom of Information review: ministers reject charging for requests – but commission recommends tightening of rules around policy formulation
Watchdog probes Ministry of Justice over Freedom of Information concerns
Addressing the challenges posed by compliance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000
Government departments have been scored on how well they perform in meeting their own targets — which range from within seven to 20 working days — for responding to correspondence.
The Department for International Development and the Department of Health are ranked second and third respectively.
In contrast, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Ministry of Justice, and the Scotland Office are ranked in the bottom three at 17th, 18th and 19th respectively.
Image courtesy of the Institute for Government: click to enlarge
The fact that the Scotland Office is the worst performing department will come as no surprise to Michael Moore, who served as Scottish secretary from 2010-2013.
Earlier this year he recalled: “At times it had seemed there was no sense of urgency or pride about such basic things as correspondence.”
But the problem is wider than the Scotland Office, the analysis suggests. Barely half of the government departments analysed managed to deal with nine out of ten items of correspondence in a timely manner.
And less than a third scored 90% or more when it came to the speed with which they responded to ministerial correspondence.
Within the overall rankings, the Northern Ireland Office had the lowest score when it came to dealing with ministerial correspondence, at just 62%.
Just one government department, the Department for Communities and Local Government, scored top marks — at 100 per cent — for the speed with which it dealt with Freedom of Information requests.
Gavin Freeguard, research manager at the Institute for Government, told CSW: “These are really important mechanisms for politicians and members of the public to be able to hold departments to account. It’s also quite a good measure of how well departments go about their business.”
Commenting on the wide variations between Whitehall departments, he said: “Some departments do really well despite a lot of correspondence coming in, and that’s probably because they are much more used to it and have developed the right sorts of systems to deal with it.”
Freeguard added: “The way that the Home Office deals with ministerial correspondence is pretty impressive, given the 40,000 plus they dealt with in 2015.”