Locations: London, Hastings
Homepage: dft.gov.uk

Departments

• Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• Department for Education
• Department for Transport
• Department for Work and Pensions
• Department of Health
• Export Credits Guarantee Department
• Food Standards Agency
• HM Revenue & Customs
• Home Office
• Ministry of Justice
• Office for National Statistics

Department for Transport

The Department for Transport's (DfT) objective is to oversee the delivery of a reliable, safe and secure transport system that responds efficiently to the needs of individuals and business whilst safeguarding our environment.

The Operational Research Unit comprises 8 staff, 4 located in London and 4 in Hastings. Operating as an internal consultancy, the unit provides an analytical problem solving service to DfT and its Agencies. ORU operates an internal hard charging regime in order to recover its costs and in both 2004/05 and 2005/06 the unit exceeded both its financial and productivity targets. Demand for the unit's services has remained high and the unit has steadily broadened its customer based. Examples of projects undertaken during the last two years include:

• Initial Evaluation of the Travelling to School Initiative initial evaluation of the Travelling to School Initiative , a joint DfT and DfES policy to reduce congestion and increase the proportion of pupils travelling to school by sustainable modes of transport.
• Smarter Travel Choices - carrying out a review of the extent to which Smarter Travel Choices are embedded in local transport planning.
• Ports Contingency Planning - organising and facilitating a workshop of private and public sector stakeholders to inform contingency planning in the ports sector.
• Seafarer Training and Employment - building a model to support the Shipping Task Force sub group in looking at the link between training and employment of UK seafarers, and tax relief given to companies. The aim was to model the current position, and estimate the cost and benefits of various proposals.
• Manpower planning - investigating the movement of staff through the department and the impact changes in their characteristics could have on the numbers of vacancies arising in future years. The purpose of this was to allow Human Resources to forecast any short and long term staffing issues, and the likelihood of DfT meeting both internal and Cabinet Office diversity targets.
• Flexible Deployment within DfT - assisting Human Resources roll-out the Flexible Deployment and to improve ways of working across DfT. This includes developing methods of measuring the benefits of Flexible Deployment and advising on the consistency of work allocation and definition.
• Contact centre supply and demand modelling - further development of an existing simulation model of contact centres across the Driver Vehicle Operator group. The model enabled DVO to test different scenarios for creating a Single Virtual Contact Centre by changing variables such as call routing rules, queuing policy, number of agents and call handling times, and show the effect of these changes on utilisation and service delivery.
• Driving examiner rostering - for the Driving Standards Agency, we designed a model to allocate driving examiners to tests in order to investigate capacity constraints at test centres. We also provided modelling and analysis to help improve demand forecasting for the practical driving test and resource allocation.
• Driver compliance checks - assisting the Association of Chief Police Officers to prepare for and run a UK-wide one day random check on driver licensing, vehicle licensing, vehicle testing and insurance, through design, sampling and statistical analysis. Similar sampling and statistical analysis has been undertaken for the Vehicle Operator Services Agency and the Northern Ireland Driver and Vehicle Testing Agency to look at vehicle condition.
• Bus punctuality monitoring - analysis of punctuality data from a selection of bus operators to investigate the extent to which the Traffic Commissioners' punctuality standard is being met. The work contributed to the development of a new standard by the Traffic Commissioners and a new approach to improving punctuality at local level through partnership between operators and local traffic authorities.