The ' Performance Account' report, provides detailed information about the FSA's service standards, its performance against them, and the measurement of customer satisfaction.
David Kenmir, FSA managing director of regulatory services, said: "We are committed to improving our business capability and effectiveness as outlined in our Business Plan and endeavour to provide an ever-faster turnaround time to firms, consumers and other stakeholders. We are pleased that over the last six months our performance against our service standards has improved significantly. There is room for improvement in some areas and we are working on this. In some categories we missed our target in only one case, out of the many that we process. It is vital to the interests of our stakeholders that we make the right regulatory decision and this means that some transactions take longer than others. Given a choice between meeting a service standard and taking more time to make the right decision, we will take more time."
"We will continue to introduce further service standards where necessary and are constantly striving to improve our performance to ensure that we meet the needs of our stakeholders."
The Performance Account shows that against the 62 processes in relation to which the FSA received applications, calls, or letters from stakeholders, in the six months to 30 September 2005; 76% of the FSA's service standards were met; 19% were nearly met and 5% were not met (where less than 90% of the target level was achieved).
The Perfomance Account shows there has been a significant improvement in the FSA's performance compared with previous reporting periods despite significant increases in the volumes of business. The results cover the first full six month reporting period since the FSA became responsible for mortgage and genreal insurance regulation. As a result of this, and because of the introduction of integrated regulatory reporting for many thousands of generally small firms, transaction volumes in many of its core processes were extremely high.
The first of the two new service standards, which were introduced on 1 October 2005, relates to the statutory rules governing the re-use of public sector information and the second is an additional voluntary service standard covering the Variation of Permission application process.
