Pay Services Directorate (Hansard, 30 January 1996)

§ Mr. Arbuthnot

The Pay Services Directorate will become a defence agency of the Ministry of Defence on 1 February 1996 following the restructuring of the Defence Accounts Agency, DAA. The agency, to be known as the Pay and Personnel Agency, PPA, is located in Bath; Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, and Worcester, with a small satellite office in Malta and will have a staff of some 960 MOD civil servants. The agency is responsible for providing pay services and personnel information support services in respect of civilian staff of the MOD and for other public sector customers. Pay services encompass payroll, all aspects of principal civil service pension scheme administration and expenses management. In addition, the agency will provide financial management information to budget holders and other customers.

A chief executive has been selected by open competition. He will be required to develop the current organisation's professional expertise and improve the high performance standards to fulfil the agency's aim of providing its customers with an efficient service which offers the best value for money. The chief executive will be set the following key targets: to deliver the range of agency services to the required time scales and to the set standards of accuracy, as published in the pay services 607W customer charter; to achieve annual efficiency savings year on year of 3.5 per cent. of cash allocation through a reduction in operating costs; to obtain quality registration to BS EN ISO 9001 standard in one further sector of the agency by 31 March 1996; to meet the Treasury accounts direction and to install a computerised, full-cost, accruals accounting system by 31 March 1996; to have new business systems hardware—known as POPSI—delivered and installed and the personnel system completed to the specification required to achieve savings, by 31 December 1996; to complete an investigation into the best commercial practices for measuring customer satisfaction with agency services by 31 December 1996; to introduce the new principal civil service pension scheme administration system—known as QUASAR—to the required specification, by 31 March 1997; to obtain quality registration to BS EN ISO 9001 standard in two further sectors of the agency by 31 March 1997; and to set an accruals baseline to permit the use of accruals—based performance targets for the agency accounts, by 31 March 1997.

I am arranging for copies of the agency's framework document to be placed in the Library of the House.