The performance of the Department for Transport
The performance of the Department for Transport

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Transport Committee

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-03-04

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9780215544322

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In this report the Transport Committee calls on the Government to implement the vision for transport - including improved traffic flows on motorways, rail electrification and high speed rail, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transport - that has been established under the current Secretary of State, Lord Adonis. The Department has made progress in a number of important areas, both recently and over the past decade, and has also established a new sense of direction, despite a too-frequent change of ministers. The Committee reviews progress against the Government's integrated transport plan, 'Transport 2010', which was adopted in 2000. Whilst much has been achieved, the ambition to build up to 25 light rail lines has not. It calls on the Government to publish a comprehensive progress report against the targets that it set itself. It also calls for strong action on local bus services which, outside London, are still not integrated with other local transport services. Bus use outside London continues to decline, apart from a slight increase after the introduction of free bus travel for older and disabled people. The Committee calls for full implementation of the Local Transport Act which gives local authorities powers to introduce bus quality partnerships and quality contracts; and for the Traffic Commissioners to be given adequate resources to carry out punctuality monitoring.

Government Performance and Results
Government Performance and Results

Author: Jerry Ellig

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2011-09-06

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1466508639

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The complexity of governments today makes the accountability desired by citizens difficult to achieve. Written to address performance policies within state and national governments, Government Performance and Results: An Evaluation of GPRA’s First Decade summarizes lessons learned from a 10-year research project that evaluated performance reports produced by federal agencies under the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). The results of this project can help answer a wide variety of questions in political economy and public administration, such as: What factors make performance reports relevant and informative? Has the quality of information disclosed to the public improved? Why do some agencies produce better reports than others? Has GPRA led to greater availability and use of performance information by federal managers? Has GPRA led to greater use of performance information in budget decisions? What steps would make federal management and budget decisions more performance oriented? The book documents the current state of the art in federal performance reporting, measures the extent of improvement, compares federal performance reports with those produced by state governments and other nations, and suggests how GPRA has affected management of federal agencies and resource allocation by policymakers. It also identifies obstacles that must be overcome if GPRA is to deliver on the promise of performance budgeting. The authors chronicle the improvements observed in federal performance reporting through the lens of the Mercatus Center’s annual Performance Report Scorecard. As budget shortfalls and new debt burdens increase interest in public management and budgeting techniques that allow governments to do more with less, this is an appropriate time to take stock of what GPRA has accomplished and what remains to be done. By comparing best performance reporting practices in the US federal government with those in states and other countries, this book speeds the diffusion of useful knowledge at a critical time.

Progress with VFM savings and lessons for cost reduction programmes
Progress with VFM savings and lessons for cost reduction programmes

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780102965391

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This report discusses how much the Treasury's Value for Money savings programme has improved value for money across government. The programme aims to achieve government-wide annual savings of £35 billion from 2008-09 to 2010-11. Today's report concludes that the Treasury's design addressed some weaknesses in earlier savings programmes, and departments have made some progress in their management of their programmes compared with previous spending periods. Nevertheless, departments' planned programmes did not contain sufficient contingency and it is unlikely that departments will achieve the government-wide target of £35 billion of annual savings, which fully meet the Comprehensive Spending Review criteria, in 2010-11. To date the NAO has reviewed reported savings amounting to some £2.8 billion from five major departments which are to deliver around 40 per cent of the government-wide total. The NAO has concluded that 38 per cent fairly represented sustainable savings (green); 44 per cent may represent savings but with some uncertainty (amber); and 18 per cent do not represent, or significantly overstate, savings (red). Common problems include the use of unsuitable baselines for the calculation of savings, a lack of transparency over arms-length bodies' reporting processes, and difficulties in demonstrating links between savings and performance. This report is accompanied by the NAO's reviews of the value for money savings reported by the Ministry of Defence (HC 292, ISBN 9780102965407); HM Revenue Customs (HC 293, ISBN 9780102965414); and the Department for Education (HC 294, ISBN 9780102965421)

Norms in Technology
Norms in Technology

Author: Marc J de Vries

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-11-30

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9400752431

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This book is a distinctive fusion of philosophy and technology, delineating the normative landscape that informs today’s technologies and tomorrow’s inventions. The authors examine what we deem to be the internal norms that govern our ever-expanding technical universe. Recognizing that developments in technology and engineering literally create our human future, transforming existing knowledge into tomorrow’s tools and infrastructure, they chart the normative criteria we use to evaluate novel technological artifacts: how, for example, do we judge a ‘good’ from a ‘bad’ expert system or nuclear power plant? As well as these ‘functional’ norms, and the norms that guide technological knowledge and reasoning, the book examines commonly agreed benchmarks in safety and risk reduction, which play a pivotal role in engineering practice. Informed by the core insight that, in technology and engineering, factual knowledge relating, for example, to the properties of materials or the load-bearing characteristics of differing construction designs is not enough, this analysis follows the often unseen foundations upon which technologies rest—the norms that guide the creative forces shaping the technical landscape to come. The book, a comprehensive survey of these emerging topics in the philosophy of technology, clarifies the role these norms (epistemological, functional, and risk-assessing) play in technological innovation, and the consequences they have for our understanding of technological knowledge.

Independent review of reported CSR07 value for money savings
Independent review of reported CSR07 value for money savings

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-07-20

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780102965414

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In Autumn 2009, HMRC reported it had achieved savings of some £300 million. The NAO examined reported savings in staffing, estates, IT and procurement which totalled £288 million a year, some 90 per cent of the reported total savings. The NAO rated 42 per cent (£121 million) as sustainable savings (green), 45 per cent (£129 million) as savings but with some uncertainty (amber) and 13 per cent (£38 million) as overstated (red). This report accompanies the broader NAO progress report on VFM savings (HC 291, 9780102965391)