Enforcement Concordat Audit

The Agency has recently completed the second annual review of its performance since the adoption of the Enforcement Concordat in April 1999. It was decided that the review should be carried out by an audit of those customers who comprise our Local Customer Panels.

The Enforcement Concordat is a document published by the Cabinet Office that sets out the standards of conduct to which signatories must adhere when carrying out enforcement action. It is designed to ensure that all enforcement work is undertaken in an open, consistent and proportional manner. Copies of the Enforcement Concordat are available from the Cabinet Office web site at: www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/regulation/publicsector/enforcement/concordat.htm

The Local Customer Panel members (now up to 124 members from 87 last year) were asked the same questions as in FY 1999/2000 to enable us to make a comparison of the Agency's performance against that recorded last year. The Panel members were asked, in broad terms, how they thought the Agency's enforcement and licensing policy is implemented throughout the UK. Once again Panel members were able to express their feelings about the Agency freely as they were not obliged to identify themselves.

Panel members were given five weeks in which to reply. Of the 124 questionnaires sent out, 37 were returned. However again it was not possible to follow up those who had not returned a questionnaire because of the anonymous nature of the survey.

The one area of concern last year was the question of the Agency's complaints procedure. Over 20% of respondents felt that the Agency did not operate an effective complaints procedure, however this year's audit showed a marked improvement with only 5% of the respondents making the same statement. It was felt that the work in this area that has been undertaken by the Agency, such as recently including a "complaints" link on the Agency's web site, contributed toward this improved result.

An issue this year was the growth of "don't know" responses. In order that this is accurately represented it was necessary to include an extra column in the bar chart representation of the audit results.

Download results of the audit in bar chart form:

Audit results 99/00	Download PDF File (13KB)   Download Word Document (262KB)
Audit results 00/01	Download PDF File (13KB)   Download Word Document (311KB)