Why the UK Government correspondence system fails citizens, and how to fix it

When someone writes to the UK Government about a policy issue they will (almost) without fail get a written response from a Government Minister. 

I drafted perhaps 100 of these responses for various Ministers during my four years as a civil servant, ranging from Brits abroad frustrated with state pension rules to parents sharing their anxieties for the safety of their child on social media. Some were deeply personal stories of hardship; some were angry tirades; others were copy-pasted verbatim from campaign websites.

The Government receives a lot of these letters. It’s not possible to say exactly how many, but we do know from Cabinet Office data that 181,927 pieces of correspondence were received in 2025 from MPs and peers (130,000 in 2024, 206,000 in 2023… etc). A large proportion of those are MPs forwarding letters onwards from their constituents.

That figure may well increase dramatically in the coming years as AI tools reduce the effort involved to write. My colleague Tom Loosemore has been sounding the alarm on the broader implications of this on demand for public services. 

The effectiveness with which the Government responds to citizens really matters. 

First and foremost it matters for Government accountability and public trust. These are thousands of personal interactions between Government and citizens on a huge range of issues. It’s important that these voices are heard and engaged with.

It also matters for state capacity - responding to these letters takes enormous time and effort from Ministers and Civil servants alike, so it is important that this effort is translating into a valuable interaction.

The task for the Government sounds quite simple in theory: get a letter, answer the question, send it back promptly. Done. It’s much more difficult in practice.

Cabinet Office guidance for responding to these letters is that replies should answer all or most of the points or questions raised, be clear, accurate and helpful, and the tone should be courteous, respectful and empathetic. 

In my experience a lot, if not the majority, of responses fall pretty far short of this standard.

That’s not due to lack of effort or commitment on the part of Ministers or civil servants. It is because the system promises a direct, personalised response but can’t consistently deliver that due to the sheer scale (reminder: 182,000 annually) combined with Government’s standard communication approach, which tends to prioritise minimising risk of negative press and reputational damage over clarity and candour.

The system that departments have developed to cope with the scale is that each policy team maintains a script of bullet points which are pre-authorised for use publicly. This is the source material for replies to letters from the public, enabling civil servants to pluck out the most relevant bullets rather than starting from scratch for each one.

Having these scripts also makes junior civil servants feel safe. If it’s in the script, it’s fine to use. If it’s not in the script, what if it’s wrong or controversial and someone sends it to the press or pursues legal action?

The problem is that these scripts, as with pretty much all Government communications, are geared exclusively towards explaining and championing what the Government is already doing. There are no expressions of doubt, authentic reflections on paths not taken, or honest statements on trade-offs that are being made. 

As a result, the Government is ingesting this enormous diversity of circumstances and concerns that members of the public are expressing in their letters, and replying with a generic broadcast of the relevant Government policy on that issue, which will often only partially answer the correspondent’s question, if at all. 

I’ve seen a fair number of correspondents write again to point that out. I’ve seen a few write repeatedly to point that out with increasing anger. A much larger number, I would guess, receive the response, shake their head, and move on, their trust in their Government lowered through the experience. 

It doesn’t serve the Ministers who put their signature to each letter, and it doesn’t serve civil servants. A key milestone in a junior civil servant’s institutionalisation, including my own, is when you stop really trying to answer the correspondent’s question and challenging your Manager on why you can’t. You follow the template so that you can get it done and move on. It was comfortably the least rewarding element of my jobs in the civil service.

In spite of these constraints, there are practical steps that the Government could take to respond more effectively.

1. Start measuring what matters: the quality of interaction.

The only performance metric in the annual transparency data released by the Cabinet Office is timeliness of response. Each Government department has a target to respond within 20 working days and, across all departments, the Government reported that it achieved that for 71% of cases in 2025.

The absence of any metrics on quality is concerning because, as my colleague Anna Goulden has written about, choosing metrics means deciding what matters to your organisation, and what doesn’t. Choosing timeliness as the sole metric for public accountability is a signal that this is what matters most, and hence effort across Government departments flows towards improving that metric, at the expense of the others related to quality of interaction.

I often saw comms on the departmental intranet celebrating improved response timeliness, procurement of new case management software to improve efficiency, experiments with AI to speed up the drafting process. I never saw evidence, activity or celebration of any quality-based initiative to simplify, answer questions more fully, or write more empathetically. 

The Cabinet Office could send a powerful signal to departments by updating their guidance to set out tools and approaches for measuring and improving quality.

2. If there isn’t good news to share, at least write with humanity 

The reality is that most of the people who take the time to write are either unhappy with the principle of the Government’s existing policy or have found themselves personally on the wrong side of it. Government cannot change policy on a dime in response to each letter, so these responses are never going to make everyone happy. 

Replies don't have to be quite so cold and factual as they often are though. It is still possible to validate the concerns that people are sharing without promising to change Government policy on their behalf. “Thank you for taking the time to write” is often as far as it goes on that front.  

Civil servants could be trained in how to spot these moments for building empathy and in writing styles that enable them to do that.

3. Use a wider range of participatory methods to engage correspondents

Given that the Government clearly cannot maintain extended, personalised 1-1 policy debates with hundreds of thousands of us at once, a more radical question is whether written letters are the right medium at all. Other methods could be more effective and could be as simple as inviting people who write together to periodic workshops to share their stories. This would invite correspondents in, rather than pulling up the drawbridge.  

Again, this isn’t about just doing what people want the Government to do. It’s about taking the time to listen and explain, and trusting that the deeper insights and feedback this generates will be valuable in the policy-making process.

A final word on AI

The temptation for civil servants in resource-stretched policy teams will be to focus service improvement efforts on how AI can speed up the drafting process. There absolutely is a role for that but with a word of warning: to quote Adam Maddison in his brilliant book the Intelligence Era Organisation, AI will amplify your current ways of working. If, as I have suggested, those current ways of working are to optimise for efficiency instead of quality interactions between citizens and state, AI will only exacerbate that, leaving the gulf between citizens’ expectation of Government and their lived experience intact. 

The new cabinet secretary’s review into the Civil Service promised to strengthen public accountability, pride and trust. Refocusing the correspondence system on its public purpose would be a good place to start, and a clear signal that the government is serious about building a new, stronger relationship with the public.