My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (John Hutton) has made the following Statement.

I am today able to announce the annual performance targets in 2007-08 for the Pension Service executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions. The targets that I have agreed are set out below.

Further information is contained in the Pension Service business plan for 2007-08, which has been published today. Copies have been placed in the Library.

The Pension Service targets 2007-08

Successful applications:

to generate a further 235,000 successful applications overall for pension credit, of which 166,000 should be for guarantee credit.

Pension traces:

to undertake 60,000 successful pension traces.

Service delivery targets:

to answer 80 per cent of all calls received in 45 seconds;

to achieve pension credit accuracy of at least 96 per cent;

to achieve state pension accuracy of at least 98 per cent;

to issue 99 per cent of winter fuel payments for 2007-08 (automatic payments and successful claims received before 22/09/07) by Christmas 2007; and

to reduce monetary value of fraud and error in pension credit to 4 per cent of pension credit expenditure.