POLITICS

Published: 14/08/2003, Volume II3, No. 5868 Page 21

The combination of some hectic last days at the office (bad) and the wonders of modern computer technology (good) has resulted in my writing this column within 200 feet of a swimming pool, where we are starting a holiday with our friends, the Blacks. I realise it already sounds like Cluedo, but the pool turns out to be relevant. And I will not be spoiling the plot if I say that neither the Blacks nor the Whites get murdered by Ms Green in the library - or indeed the pool.

In the course of my duties, I recently had to telephone several professor types at smart management colleges in the home counties to see what they felt about the inadequacies of politicians' insights into the real world of business. I was struck by their scorn (predictable), but also by their despair at the target-based performance culture which has developed in the British public sector culture in the past decade or so.

'Politicians tinker with one initiative after another whereas ultimately running a business is about getting certain things right over time, ' said Professor X who complained bitterly that measuring performance against a plethora of targets in the public sector simply puts everyone on the defensive.

'In too many cases, targets are used to blame people publicly - those poor finance directors in the NHS who get told, 'You have got three months to get it right or get fired'. In the private sector, you only go public when the manager in question has put it right, ' my professor insisted.

Naturally I thought of this a few days later when the Commons public accounts committee published its fifth 2002-03 report, On Target?

Government by measurement. That was the one which generated headlines after Bristol Eye Hospital's witness admitted that, in order to meet the new waiting-time target, follow-up sessions had been cancelled and - in just two years - 25 people lost their sight, including a deaf old lady who had relied on sign language to communicate with her deaf husband.

Awful, though I do not think we can blame Whitehall targets for that, can we Bristol? In fact, I thought it a good report. I am in favour of adversarial party politics as an instrument of good government, but they can be crudely divisive as the Milburn-Fox name-calling over targets has often been.

The PAC is now chaired by a Thatcherite Tory ex-minister, Edward Leigh, who has six children (is this a target hit or missed, I wonder? ), but contains a fair-minded passage I cannot recall seeing in a select committee report before.

It calmly states that the government's claim that 87 per cent of its 1998 targets have been met is valid but misleading because it does not admit that it refers only to the main targets and excludes, for instance, those where performance data is unavailable. But the Tory claim that 38 per cent of targets were not met is also misleading in its own way.

All in all, the PAC makes suggestions that should please my management consultant friends: more decentralisation (which gets councils and customers involved in target-setting), better measurement of achievement, a much stronger emphasis on 'progress in performance' - not absolute targets.

But the PAC underlines that, whatever Dr Fox says in opposition about ditching targets, they are here to stay.

It happens that Mrs Black is a senior social housing manager. 'What do targets do for you, ' I asked when she came in from her dawn swim. 'It certainly works; whatever's measured gets done, ' she said with unexpected enthusiasm. And how many laps had she just swum? Twenty eight, she said.Unthinking, I replied: 'Well, It is only our first day. I am swimming slowly. I'll start counting tomorrow. I find that when I measure my swimming I swim faster and do more.' Enough said.

On Target? Government by measurement . HC 62-1.£11.