United Kingdom benchmarking

As a result, the formal coordination within the European Union beyond the EU ETS Directive did not essentially influence the structure and the concrete rules of the German NAP. At the same time, the discussions in the other Member States played a role that should not be underestimated. Above all, information on the continuing discussions concerning the NAPs of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands was substantially important at a certain point. However, in spite of the very intensive debates at the various levels, the central points of the discussion in other states, like the allocation and the consideration of competition-related questions in the United Kingdom or the allocation on the basis of benchmarks in the Netherlands, did not find their way into the German NAP. Nevertheless, within the political debate focused on the individual rules of the NAP, different stakeholders always stressed examples from the discussions taking place in the other Member States. Policy by rumours constituted a facet of the... 

Activation was reintroduced by the report of the Hartz Commission who made references to good practices at the national levels, e g. models of effective cooperation between BA and municipalities in selected Mozart projects, as well as international best practices and benchmarking of labour market performance and pohcies. Hence, the Hartz reforms focus was inspired by activating policies for the unemployed in other European countries that were perceived to be more success-fill in lowering unemployment such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Denmark (Bruttel and Kemmerling 2006 Eichhorst et al. 2001 Fleckenstein 2004). 

Another relevant benchmark came from a pubhc hearing that the Chemical Safety Board held on September 15, 2010. Authorities on the implementation of Safety Cases in the United Kingdom, Austraha, and Norway said that it took about 5 years to develop a representative program. 

A national accreditation scheme - based on BS ISO 17020 - has been established for inspection bodies under the aegis of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS). Inspection bodies operating within this scheme are required to establish and maintain a quality system within their scope of activities which is subject to ongoing assessment by UKAS. The scheme is supported by HSE and provides a good benchmark for the owners or users of plant to use if and when subcontracting inspections by a competent person to another company. 

The SUNflower approach was first presented in 2002 (Koomstra et al., 2002), when the road safety efforts of the three safest countries worldwide were compared Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The main aim of this comparison was to acquire better insight into the policy development processes of these three countries. It was hoped that this comparison would identify the crucial points that had made it possible for these nations to improve their respective road safety records, and to learn how further improvements could be achieved. Later, this approach was expanded to include nine countries (Wegman et al., 2008). These efforts eventually resulted in a proposal to benchmark the safety performance of countries and jurisdictions (states within countries, provinces) using a composite road safety performance index (Wegman et al., 2008 Wegman and Oppe, 2010). 

Floating rate notes (FRNs) are bonds that have variable rates of interest the coupon rate is linked to a specified index and changes periodically as the index changes. An FRN is usually issued with a coupon that pays a fixed spread over a reference index for example, the coupon may be 50 basis points over the six-month interbank rate. Since the value for the reference benchmark index is not known, it is not possible to calculate the redemption yield for an FRN. The FRN market in countries such as the United States and United Kingdom is large and well-developed floating-rate bonds are particularly popular with short-term investors and financial institutions such as banks. 

---