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The recurring phrases of ministerial answers
Whitehall answers written questions in a house style, and some of its formulations recur thousands of times a year. This page counts them: for each department, the share of its answers that use each phrase, with verbatim examples linked to the official record.
These are counted phrases, not judgements. No model reads these answers, no verdict attaches to any minister, and every count can be reproduced from the published pattern and the official record. Whether an answer that uses one of these phrases is an adequate answer is for the reader, and the Member who asked, to judge.
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Methodology: exactly what is counted
The corpus is every answered written question tabled in the 365 days up to the record-complete date shown above, from our synced copy of the official record. For each pattern we count the answers whose text matches a fixed, case-insensitive, whole-word regular expression. Text inside double quotation marks is removed before matching, because answers routinely restate the question verbatim and a phrase the department did not use must not be counted against it. Departments with fewer than 150 answers in the window are left out of the tables; a percentage over a handful of answers is noise.
The full pattern list is published here, so every count is reproducible:
| Pattern | Regular expression |
|---|---|
| Information not held centrally | \b(?:not\s+held\s+centrally)\b |
| Referred to an earlier answer | \b(?:I\s+refer\s+(?:the|my)\s+(?:right\s+)?(?:hon(?:ourable)?\.?\s+)?(?:and\s+learned\s+|and\s+gallant\s+)?(?:Member|Lady|Gentleman|Friend)|I\s+refer\s+the\s+noble\s+(?:Lord|Lady|Baroness|Earl))\b |
| No plans to | \b(?:no\s+(?:current\s+|present\s+)?plans\s+to)\b |
| Disproportionate cost | \b(?:disproportionate\s+cost)\b |
| Commercially sensitive | \b(?:commercially\s+sensitive)\b |
| In due course | \b(?:in\s+due\s+course)\b |
| Under review | \b(?:under\s+(?:close\s+|constant\s+|continual\s+|continuous\s+)?review)\b |
Examples are quoted verbatim from the official record, chosen as the most recent matching answer from each department, and are never edited beyond truncation marked with an ellipsis. Each links to the question’s page on questions-statements.parliament.uk, where the full question and answer can be read in context.
Free to quote with attribution to “Emily Politics” and a link to this page. Every figure is a real database measurement over the official record, taken on the date shown; nothing is estimated.
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