In October 2010 the Committee in response to a report by its predecessor committee began a trial exercise in monitoring unsatisfactory and late answers to written Parliamentary questions. With just over 50 complaints from Members in response to the exercise of which half were followed up. This resulted in answers for Members on a number of occasions in circumstances where they would otherwise have found difficult or impossible to follow up on an inadequate response. The exercise will now come to an end and be put on a more permanent footing.In consideration of a memorandum from the Leader of the House providing statistics on the time taken to respond to WPQs in 2010-12, the committee has sought explanations from Ministers in charge of poorly performing departments for the level of performance in the memorandum and what steps are being taken to improve these levels. The Department for Education had a particularly poor performance and evidence was taken from the Parliamentary Under Secretary and a senior official in the Department which the Committee found unsatisfactory with and so a follow up session with the Permanent Secretary and Secretary of State was undertaken. The Committee will continue its interest in the answering performance of this Department and hold it to further account should its performance not improve markedly.

Overall performance in timeliness of answering of written Parliamentary questions has improved since 2010-12, from 69% to 76% in respect of ordinary written questions answered within a working week of tabling and from 69% to 73% in respect of named day questions answered on the named day. The performance of certain departments, however, remains poor, and those with whom the Committee has been in correspondence this year should consider themselves to be "on notice" that if the improvements which have been promised do not materialise when the statistics for 2013-14 are examined, the Committee will be considering very carefully what action, possibly including further oral evidence sessions, it is necessary to take.

Parliamentary questions are a feature of almost all national legislatures. Despite this, we know very little about how questions are used by MPs and what impact questions have on controlling the government. This volume advances our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the use of questioning in a number of different parliamentary settings. The propensity of parliamentarians to ask questions indicates that the interrogatories are an important tool for measuring an individual legislator’s job. Ultimately, how a parliamentarian chooses to use the questioning tool provides a unique insight into legislator behaviour and role orientation. Many of the chapters in this volume provide new empirical measures of legislator activity and use this data to provide new tests of leading theories of legislator behaviour. At an institutional level, questions provide an important source of information for the chamber and are a critical tool of government oversight – as many of the chapters in the volume indicate. Evidence of the impact of questions on executive and bureaucratic oversight challenges conventional views of parliaments as weak and ineffective parts of the political process. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.