Memorandum from Ian Pearson MP, then Economic
and Business Minister at the Department for Business, Enterprise
& Regulatory Reform
Thank you for your letter of 16 October,
and for your congratulations on my appointment at BERR. I, too,
look forward to working closely with the Committees and building
on the constructive working relationship that we enjoyed under
Malcolm Wicks.
Let me start by reassuring you that there has
not been a serious deterioration in the time taken to process
SIEL applications. A direct comparison of the figures quoted in
the Robert Goodwill answer and those quoted in recent Quarterly
Reports is misleading, because the figures were not calculated
on the same basis. The Export Control Organisation (ECO) uses
the median, rather than the average figure for processing performance
in the Quarterly and Annual Reports. This is because average figures
can be skewed by a small number of very difficult applications
that have taken a long time to be processed, and therefore do
not give a true impression of performance.
The figure used in the response to Robert Goodwill
MP was the longer average figure (20 days). At the end of
September 2008, the median processing time for 2008 to date
stood at 13 days, as against the average processing time
of 20 days. This is a good performance and well within target.
It should also be noted that the ECO handled 30% more applications
for the year to date at the end of September 2008 than it
did for the same period in 2007. As an example, in September 2008,
1,289 applications were processed, with 900 of these
making the target of 20 working days.
In October 2008, 1324 applications were
processed with 1011 (76%) making the 20 working day
target. If this trend continues, it is likely that the ECO will
have processed almost 13,000 applications by the end of the
year and more cases will have been processed on target than in
any preceding year.
I hope this is helpful.
11 November 2008
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