the problem with the UK government is that they set themselves targets and then mark themselves based on those targets, so u can imagine they will only set targets they know they can reach and do all they can to achieve them. i am sure if someone asked the question to Charles Clarke in the house of commons, his answer would be 'currently we are clearing 90% of the the applicants within 1 day of receipt of the application and this is over and above the targets we set in the October review....' there will be no mention of the poor applicant from June the 25th still waiting for a response, simply because when he/she applied there were no targets set at that time, so as far as the HO is concerned they are doing "Very Well".
True about pple having to lose out on jobs because their applications were still in the queue, even the 'urgent' queue was sacrificed to meet the new targets. the one good thing about it is that they did move quite quickly thru the dec/jan and current feb applications and they have hopefully cleared the urgent queue, so hopefully they will move at the same pace with the backlogged applicants.
the one problem i can foresee is that next month (march) they will probably get in more applications than normal as pple will be trying to get their applications in before the new charges come into place on the 1st of April