Memorandum from Ian Pearson MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, BERR

 

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 Committee 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.

 

November 2008