Ministers' Correspondence with Members of Parliament
Good Practice
General
- Departments should adhere to the principles contained in this guidance.
- Officials in departmental correspondence units should consider holding regular meetings and maintain regular contact with colleagues in other departmental correspondence units to gain a better idea of the workings of each department, to share 'best practice' and to gain knowledge of the policy areas covered. This will be of particular benefit when handling transfers and cross-departmental correspondence and in resolving disputes.
Improving the Quality of Replies
- Each department should prepare their own internal guidance for officials on how to draft replies to correspondence. This might include templates, a list of "dos and don'ts" and guidance on the style which individual Ministers prefer. Departments should ensure that this guidance is disseminated to those who regularly draft correspondence and that it is easily accessible to all staff.
Raising the Profile of Correspondence Handling
- Staff should be regularly reminded of the importance that Ministers attach to correspondence handling through in-house seminars, workshops, staff magazines and office notices.
Improving Performance
- Each department should ensure that one Minister takes formal responsibility for correspondence issues and for overseeing performance. This will ensure that the pressure to improve performance is maintained.
- Each department should have effective systems in place to monitor and "chase" replies to Ministerial correspondence.
- When setting up new IT systems for processing/monitoring correspondence, departments should actively seek the advice of other departments and learn from their experiences. Departments should ensure that any system they adopt is compatible with other internal IT systems.
- Central correspondence units should seek to improve their working relationships with key policy units.
- Each department should produce regular internal statistics on the performance of individual business units/divisions. These could be used to produce "league tables" to identify the best - and worst - performers. In particular, these tables can be an important tool in identifying where additional resources might be needed to deal with a high pressure area where levels of correspondence are above the norm.
- Each department should adopt a proactive approach to correspondence handling. For example, departments could consider setting up dedicated central drafting teams to draft replies to Ministerial correspondence. Each department should also attempt to anticipate flows of correspondence and plan ahead. For example, if it can be predicted that a forthcoming policy announcement is likely to result in a substantial amount of correspondence, departments might consider asking Ministers to write to all MPs in a form which can be passed on direct to MPs' constituents (in an attempt to stem the amount of constituency correspondence from MPs coming into Ministers' offices).
Speeding up the Process
- Departments should ensure that effective systems are in place when handling correspondence that needs to be transferred. Correspondence that a department plans to transfer should continue to be monitored until it has been accepted by the receiving department.
- Those officials tasked with chasing late replies should have the necessary authority to demand action where replies are not forthcoming.
- Each department should explore further the opportunities offered by new technologies to speed up their handling of MPs' correspondence.
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