Service standards

About the FSA
- Aims and objectives
  - The Performance Account
    - Service standards
      - Currently applicable standards
      - Latest results

Service standards are specified levels of performance that we have agreed to meet in performing our regulatory functions. Most are voluntary commitments; however, some are statutory and relate to provisions in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) or other legislation.

The service standards portfolio provides information about key areas of our service, how we are performing and how satisfied our customers are. The standards apply to a range of our services, including how we deal with telephone enquiries, correspondence and applications. We continue to consider introducing more standards to help us meet the needs of our stakeholders.

In the interests of our stakeholders it is vital that we make the right regulatory decisions and sometimes this will mean that some transactions take longer than our target timescales. Given a choice between meeting a standard and taking more time to make the right decision, we will take more time.

This Performance Account reviews the 64 service standards that were in place between 1 October 2007 and 31 March 2008. View our latest results for performance against these service standards.

Key changes to our service standards

We are constantly seeking to improve our performance and continuously review the portfolio of standards, implementing necessary changes at the beginning of each new six-month reporting period.

This portfolio contains changes to existing standards; the introduction of new standards and the removal of some low volume standards. As a result, the service standards portfolio now consists of 57 standards.

The changes described below came into effect on 1 April 2008.

New standards

We have introduced three new standards:

Money Laundering registrations (A1.2)
This new statutory standard has been introduced to measure volumes of Money Laundering registrations processed.
Cancellation of applications (R8.1b)
This new voluntary standard extends the scope of the existing cancellation standards (R8.3 and R8.4) by removing the reference to low-complexity applications. We found the existing individual standards difficult to measure as they applied only to a low proportion of applications. Moreover, these measures will not be available when we implement our major new Business Automation in Regulatory Transactions (BART) programme during this financial year. Where standards have been combined, we will remove existing individual standards.
Customer facing IS systems (CM11.4)
This new voluntary standard extends the scope of our customer facing systems' availability from three to six. The existing standards for Firms Online (CM11.1), Electronic Listing Service (ELS) (CM11.2) and the FSA Register (CM11.3) systems have been combined with performance of the FSA website, Compare Products and Fee Calculator systems, to form this new standard. While this new standard will streamline these six systems into one result, we will provide a breakdown of the individual systems' performances.

We will give the first performance figures for these new standards in the next update to this account in October 2008.

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Low volume standards

We have also removed a number of standards from the portfolio that have attracted low volumes of applications/requests in the past.

The following standards have been removed:

Collective Investment Schemes applications (A4.1)
Overseas Investment Exchanges and Overseas Clearing Houses applications (A7.1)
Investment Exchanges and Clearing Houses applications (A7.2)
Requests for information made under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 (CM6.2)
Requests for information made under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (CM8.1)

While we have removed these standards from external reporting, we will continue to measure their performance internally.

Other changes

We have reviewed Authorisation standard (A2.1) and, as a result, made the following change to its definition:

To process applications for the authorisation of new schemes under section 242 for Authorised Unit Trusts (AUT) and Regulation 12 for Open Ended Investment Companies (OEIC).

We have also reviewed Communications standard (CM1.2) and consequently will be monitoring Light ARROW plus Capital assessments (Individual Capital Adequacy Standards, Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process) within the target timescale of 10 weeks.

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