DWP Autumn Performance Report 2004: Progress against Public Service Agreement targets
The Department for Work and Pensions' aim and objectives
The Department for Work and Pensions exists to deliver the Government’s welfare reform agenda through a radical and far-reaching programme of change. Its principal aim is to promote opportunity and independence for all.
To support this aim the Department has a number of strategic objectives:
- to ensure the best start for all children and end child poverty by 2020;
- to promote work as the best form of welfare for people of working age, while protecting the position of those in greatest need;
- to combat poverty and promote security and independence in retirement for today’s and tomorrow’s pensioners;
- to improve rights and opportunities for disabled people in a fair and inclusive society; and
- modernise welfare delivery so as to improve the accessibility, accuracy and value for money of services to customers, including employers.
These objectives are underpinned by the Department’s Public Service Agreement (PSA) which sets out the specific targets that must be met in return for the resources provided through the Government’s Spending Review.
The Government set out its spending plans for the financial years 2003–04 to 2005–06 in the 2002 Spending Review White Paper, Opportunity and Security for All: Investing in an enterprising, fairer Britain (Footnote 1)(Cm 5570 July 2002). This included ten PSA targets for the Department which came into effect from April 2003.
A revised set of PSA targets for the financial years 2005–06 to 2007–08 was agreed as part of the 2004 Spending Review settlement. These are set out in full in the Public Service Agreements White Paper (Footnote 2) (Cm 6238, July 2004).
These new PSA targets will come into effect from April 2005. Figure 1 shows how the Spending Review 2004 (SR2004) targets have evolved from the SR2002 ones.
The purpose of this Autumn Performance Report is to provide information for the period up to November 2004 on the progress the Department has made towards all current PSA targets.
It includes:
- PSA targets for the period up to March 2006;
- an up-to-date assessment on performance against targets; and
- details of how performance is measured and an assessment of data quality.
The report also includes information on progress against those ongoing Comprehensive Spending Review 1998 (CSR98) and Spending Review 2000 (SR2000) targets that have not been superseded by the Spending Review 2002 (SR2002) targets.
This report is intended to complement the Department’s Resource Accounts for 2003–04 which are to be published in December 2004. A comprehensive account of the Department’s activities and spending plans can be found in the Departmental Report (Footnote 3) (Cm 6221, April 2004).