Defence Research Agency (Hansard, 14 January 1994)

§ Mr. Aitken

This is a matter delegated to the Defence Research Agency under its framework document. I have therefore asked the chief executive to reply direct to the hon. Member.

Letter from John Chisholm to Dr. David Clark, dated 14 January 1994:

In today's written answer the Minister of State for Defence Procurement informed you that I would be replying to your two questions about the quality of service-provided by the DRA and the customer satisfaction survey.

I will deal with the customer satisfaction survey first. As I said in my answer of 16 December the survey is very extensive and is undertaken each year by an independent contractor experienced in this sort of work. The detailed results of the analysis are presented to me in a report by the contractor. Since this report includes information which has been collected in confidence it would not be right for me to put it into the public domain.

What I can say, however, is that the first two surveys showed a consistent picture and that our customers recognise that we are making good progress in achieving better performance. As I said in my last answer we analyse our performance against eight criteria: overall customer satisfaction, technical quality, facilities, staff reputation, understanding our customers' needs, project management and formal quality. The surveys showed the DRA scoring well on the first five criteria particularly technical quality and understanding of customers' needs. The 1992 survey showed a real improvement in responsiveness over the 1991 survey. Both surveys showed we had work to do in project management and 347W formal quality. This is not surprising as the DRA has only had a formal customer/supplier relationship since becoming a Trading Fund in April 1993. Before this the organisation did not operate on a project basis and had no requirement for formal quality certification. I shall be looking with interest at the results of the 1993 survey (which I will receive shortly) to see if the benefits of the initiatives we have launched to correct those weaknesses have yet been detected by our customers.

You also asked what other measures we use beside the survey to gauge the quality of the service we offer. The major measure which is also one of my key performance targets, is achievement of customer programme "milestones". This means achieving a specific technical goal on time and to cost. We started from a low base level of only 50℅ in 1991/92 and our target is to reach 85℅ by 1997/98. But in fact we are already this year likely to achieve in excess of 80℅ which reflects very well on the enthusiasm of the organisation to turn itself into an efficient customer oriented business. Additionally we have some indication of the underlying scientific quality of our work through the peer group assessments of the quality of our strategic research proposals. These too show a steady improvement over the last three years.