HC 62 deadline passes with no department

The Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published HC 62 (House of Commons paper 62), "Science diplomacy: Sovereignty, strategy, and the global race", on 7 July 2026 . Under the two-month convention the government reply fell due on 7 September. As of 8 September 2026 no government response to HC 62 appears on the committee's publications page. ¹

Thirteen days after the report was published, the UK abolished DSIT (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology), splitting its functions across the Cabinet Office and two new departments . Committee chair Chi Onwurah warned on 24 July that the closure would fragment oversight, and this briefing logged the response as due with no indication of which successor body would draft it . No department can be named as having missed this deadline, because none has been established as owing it. The gov.uk content API today returns no ministers at all for DSIT, while the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade returns a full ministerial team under Jonathan Reynolds. ²

A late reply on its own would carry little weight. This committee's three most recent government responses arrived 95, 98 and 227 days after the report they answered, so a day past the convention would be unremarkable on that record. ³ A response can also be received before it is published, and the government can still send one. What the published record shows is a dated obligation that came due against a counterparty that no longer exists, rather than a refusal to answer.

Machinery-of-government changes normally move an obligation from one letterhead to another. The gap here is that no letterhead has been identified in public, seven weeks after the department closed, on a report about the UK's ability to hold its own in international Science and technology.