Our four key priorities:
- Save energy with the Green Deal and support vulnerable consumers
- Reduce energy use by households, businesses and the public sector, and help to protect the fuel poor
- Deliver secure energy on the way to a low carbon energy future
- Reform the energy market to ensure that the UK has a diverse, safe, secure and affordable energy system and incentivise low carbon investment and deployment
- Drive ambitious action on climate change at home and abroad
- Work for international action to tackle climate change, and work with other government departments to ensure that we meet UK carbon budgets efficiently and effectively
- Manage our energy legacy responsibly and cost-effectively
- Ensure public safety and value for money in the way we manage our nuclear, coal and other energy liabilities
Business Plan
13 May 2011: DECC published its Departmental Business Plan, which sets out a vision for the work of the Department and aims to provide greater transparency to the public about our performance.
Business Plans provide detail on how Departments are delivering the reform programme set out by the Coalition - they are not intended to be a complete overview of all the Department’s business. As such, some areas of the Department’s ongoing business, which remain a key priority for the Government’s work, are not specifically covered in the document.
The Business Plan replaces the Structural Reform Plan launched in 2010 and reveals a new set of input and impact indicators, which will allow people to scrutinise what we do, particularly whether our policies and reforms are having the effect the public want and we are being run efficiently.
Some of the impact indicators the Department will publish include:
- The total number of energy efficiency installations (cavity wall and loft insulation) in UK households
- The number of households in ‘fuel poverty’ (subject to independent review of fuel poverty target and definition)
- Percentage of energy consumed in the UK that has been generated from renewable sources
- The spare capacity of the UK’s gas and electricity networks (difference between maximum possible supply and actual peak demand)
- The impact of other countries’ pledges to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions on predicted global emissions
- Total emissions of greenhouse gases from the UK (showing progress against legal limits on emissions (carbon budgets)
The Business Plan was updated in April 2011 to reflect the feedback we received from the public and stakeholders on the indicators. Additional financial data has also been added to provide details of how the Department expects to allocate funds to Business Plan objectives for financial year 2001/2012 and historical spend on a number of areas such as estates and procurement for financial year 2009/10.
Updates on progress
Each month, DECC reports on progress against actions in the Structural Reform Plan, which can now be found at Section C of the overall DECC Business Plan.
The Departmental draft Structural Reform Plans were first published in July 2010. Progress from July to October 2010 was monitored monthly, and below are the previous monthly reports outlining what we achieved for those periods. The SRP has since been subsumed into the full Business Plan and future updates will be presented on this page. They are also available on the No10 Business Plan site.
DECC’s approach to transparency
Transparency is a key operating principle for the department and will be championed at Board level by the Chief Operating Officer.
The department will operate transparently and the default position is that all data will be published, although we will continue to protect sensitive data. Where data is published it will be in line with the Public Data Principles and registered on data.gov.uk
For more information on DECC's approach to transparency, visit our Transparency and Freedom of Information pages.
DECC Indicators
Impact indicators are intended to allow the public to monitor the department’s overall progress against its objectives. Indicators and associated data systems were selected to follow government best practice regarding open data standards (including usability by third parties), as set out in the draft Public Data Transparency Principles published by the Transparency Board.