Customer Charters (Hansard, 19 March 1997)

Mr. John M. Taylor

For the agencies, responsibility for expenditure in this area lies with the chief executives. I have asked them to reply direct.

Two service providers in the main Department have citizens charter commitments. These are the redundancy payments service, which has a charter, and the overseas trade services, which has a charter standard statement.

For the RPS, approximately 1.6 million charter leaflets were produced between 1991 and 1996 at a cost of around £37,000. This figure does not include drafting and distribution costs which are not separately identifiable.

OTS has included its charter standard statement in a number of publications including "A guide to export services". Around 80,000 copies of this document were issued in 1996. Costs for the charter standard statement are not separately identifiable in the costs of producing and distributing these publications. Figures are not available for the cost of drafting the charter standard statement.

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Letter from Dr. Seton Bennett to Mr. Brian Donohoe, dated 19 March 1997: The President of the Board of Trade has asked me to reply on behalf of the National Weights and Measures Laboratory to your question about expenditure associated with the production of customer charters and Customer Standard documents. One thousand copies of NWML's Code of Practice were printed at a cost of £870 in December 1993. This figure does not include the costs of drafting and distribution, which are not separately identifiable.

Letter from J. C. Octon to Mr. Brian Donohoe, dated 19 March 1997: In the absence of the Chief Executive I am replying for the Patent Office to your Parliamentary Question to the President of the Board of Trade about the cost of publishing and circulating customer charters and customer standard documents. The Patent Office produces a single leaflet which serves as its charter statement and customer service standards. We have no estimate for staff time spent in drawing up and consulting over its content but during the past financial year 36,000 copies have been printed and circulated at a cost of £3,150. This includes the cost of printing 200 customer service standard posters for display within the office.

Letter from John S. Holden to Mr. Brian Donohoe, dated 19 March 1997: You recently asked the President of the Board of Trade for information about expenditure related to customer charters and customer standard documents. As Chief Executive I have been asked to reply to you direct. As an Agency responsible for aspects of law enforcement, we also publish a Code for Enforcement which is combined with our Charter Standard Statement as a single document. The costs about which you have asked, and which apply to the document as a whole, are as follows: Drafting: £2,000 Approximately one man month Publishing: £5,547 Circulation: £750 Approximately for postage costs incurred Copies issued: 6,200.

Letter from Desmond Flynn to Mr. Brian Donohoe, dated 19 March 1997: You asked the President of the Board of Trade a question about the Department of Trade and Industry expenditure in drafting, publishing and circulating each of their Customer Charters and Customer Standard documents: and how many copies of each document have been issued. I am replying in the absence of Peter Joyce, the Chief Executive, from the office. The Insolvency Service first issued its Published Standard during the financial year 1992/93. Between February 1993 and November 1995 a total of 147,900 leaflets and 886 Published Standard posters and charts of performance against standard were produced at a total cost of £26,024. This included both design and print work. The Published Standard was recently revised and a further 280,000 leaflets and 50 posters have been produced for use in the coming 12–18 months at a total cost of £7,967. It is not possible to quantify the cost of drafting the revised Published Standard as this was work completed within The Service as part of normal staff duties. As regards distribution, the leaflets are made available to the public at the offices of Official Receivers and at the Courts.

Letter from Jim Norton to Mr. Brian Donohoe, dated 19 March 1997: You have put down a Parliamentary Question asking for the cost of producing and issuing Charter Standard documents. I have been asked to reply direct to you on behalf of the Radiocommunications Agency. 637W My Agency produces a number of Citizen's Charter related information sheets for the benefit of our customers. These documents set out our Charter Standard principles, details of our performance against published standards, how to complain against Agency levels of service and a Code of Practice explaining the responsibilities of our Local Offices and how they work with businesses in enforcing wireless telegraphy legislation. Our family of Charter leaflets were introduced during 1994, since when the total numbers and costs of printing and numbers issued are as follows: RA Complaints Procedures (RA238): 4,000 have been ordered to date at a cost of £424.00, of these 3,695 have been distributed; RA Performance Standards (RA239): 5,000 have been ordered to date at a cost of £1,400.00, of these 4,639 have been distributed; RA Local Offices Code of Practices (RA248): 3,000 have been ordered at a cost of £500.00, of these 2,786 have been distributed; RA Citizen's Charter Statement (RA251): 7,000 have been ordered at a cost of £1,083, of these 6,161 have been distributed. It is impossible to say what the cost of circulating these documents has been. Many copies are given out at exhibitions which the Agency attends, distributed along with other documents requested by customers or in multiple numbers to interested parties. The drafting of the leaflets is all done in-house by staff who are involved in these duties in any event and it is again impossible to separate out these costs. With the exception of the Performance Standards leaflet (amended and reprinted annually), none of these documents has been changed since their introduction, nevertheless, drafting of the originals is estimated to have occupied around 5 man days of effort in total. For your information I enclose copies of each of these leaflets, (RA239 is currently under review to cover our 1997/98 targets), which I hope will be of interest to you.