Service Standards
Turning applications around in 10 days
The Province added a significant new target for Better Regulation in the spring of 2007. A commitment to turn around most licenses and permits issued by provincial departments within 10 business days will be met by 2010. This complements the effort to reduce paperwork by tackling the time business waits to hear the results of their application.
"Businesses don't mind risk, but they hate uncertainty," said Paul Taylor, former deputy minister of Economic Development. "Setting service standards will go a long way to improve the predictability of government processes for business, allowing them to use their time more efficiently."
Service standards longer than 10 days
Protecting citizens, communities and the environment is still crucial, so certain licences and permits will have service standards longer than 10 days.
Those standards have to meet criteria approved by Cabinet and have to be publicized so business can count on a predictable process and time frame. In total, departments have requested other service standards for 21% of all licences and permits. Combined, they represent less than one percent of the 2 million applications submitted last year.
Success defined
For a licence or permit to meet its service standard in a given year, employees have to process 90% of the applications within the allotted number of business days. Departments begin counting the days when they receive a completed application, and the clock stops when they send a response.
In 2008/09, 80% of licences and permits with transactions met their service standards. That includes those with a standard of 10 business days and those licences and permits with a longer service standard. Licences and permits that had no transactions in the past year – usually because they apply to a rarer event – weren’t counted since they didn’t fall into either category: met standard or needs improvement. However, those licences and permits will be counted in any year they have transactions.
Find the service standard for each licence and permit on the Permits Directory.
See the Service Standards Fact Sheet (Jun 2008, 0.2MB PDF).
View our progress on service standards in the latest Better Regulation 2008/09 Progress Report (Oct 2009, 1.1MB PDF).
