Labour 'failing to achieve targets'

12 April 2012

The Government has been accused of systematically failing to fulfil promises as the Conservatives claimed it had missed - or would miss - 136 of its own targets.

A Tory analysis of Labour's record in office compiled a list of shortcomings which they said were contained in the Government's own departmental performance reports.

The first annual report of the Tories' new "delivery watchdog", which the party has dubbed Ofspin, said that Labour was failing to deliver on its own priorities.

It claimed that ministers were on course to miss, or already had missed, 136 targets.

Almost a quarter of those were laid at the door of the Department for Education and Skills, which had failed to hit targets on improvements in GCSE results or reducing by 12% the proportion of children living in non-working households.

The Treasury and HM Revenue and Customs, overseen by Gordon Brown, were responsible for 16 missed or slipping targets, the Tories said.

Other targets where there was claimed to be "slippage" included those on cutting health inequalities, improving the reliability of journeys on the road network and reducing the use of class A drugs by under-25s.

Shadow cabinet minister Chris Grayling said that the Tory dossier served to replace the Government's annual report, which has not been published for several years.

He said: "When Labour came to office, they published a short-lived annual report and asked the public to hold them to account if they didn't keep their promises.

"Ten years on, and six years after they quietly abandoned their report, our own version shows that despite the Government's original good intentions, there has been a systematic failure to deliver on those promises."

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