Missed targets in ministerial statements

Given I'm a saddo, I've been having a read through some of these ministerial statements that the Government made today to see what they may have hoped to go unnoticed. One of the things buried in there was a rather amusing and equally worrying statement from Vernon Coaker about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

For a start, there's the net liabilities on the balance sheet which are pretty staggering, £1,187 million to be precise. Now fair enough, this is a compensation authority so it's probably going to have quite high liabilities, but £1.1 billion certainly surprised me.

Having said that though, the net liabilties are the really worrying, or amusing part. No, that came in the last three sentences of the statements. Coaker said,

In 2006–07 the authority received 60,861 applications for compensation and resolved 59,096.

OK, that doesn't sound too bad. Good work!

The number of cases outstanding at 31 March 2007 was 87,543.

Errrm.. what was good has suddenly become bad.

The proportion of cases decided within 12 months was 62.9 per cent.

Well that's just appalling. Especially when in 2001 they had a target to "provide a decision in 90% of cases within 12 months". And last year the target was to decide 90.9% of 80% of all appeals with 12 months (% of a % huh? nice!).

So basically, they're crap.