Using Prorogation to avoid questions?

There's little doubt that the ability of the Government to avoid answering questions in Parliament is pretty well established. Sometimes, if a question has two parts they will simply ignore one part, or the classic is to say that answering will cost too much money. Occassionally they will admit they don't know the answer, and then a few weeks later the answer will appear through a Freedom of Information request, or thanks to a slightly altered question.

There is one other way of not answering a question that is purely part of the administrative process of Parliament, Prorogation. This is when the session ends and the question cannot be answered in time meaning it must be resubmitted by the questioner in the next session. The rules state that when this occurs the response should simply be "It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation."

I'm not 100% sure why the question must be resubmitted as it seems like that will actually involve spending more money to repeat the process of getting something into someone's In-Tray but who am I to question the logic of Parliamentary procedure? This said, it's worth noting that on average there are about 100 or so question answered every day. On October 30th there were over 600, suggesting they had quite backlog.

Many departments provided substantive answers, but some were not quite so forthcoming. The Department of Culture Media and Sport for example had 34 questions to answer and for 26 of them it used the "not enough time Guv" excuse. Failing to answer 76% of questions, some of which, at least to me, probably did not require much time seems awfully high, especially when you look and see that many were responses to holding answers provided over a week before - meaning they sat on it.

Like I say, I'm not saying that prorogation is being used as a Parliamentary stonewalling tool, but I can't help suspecting it's the case when you see the explosion of questions that have clearly been sitting in a pile somewhere not being looked at - for whatever reason.