By Tom Gash
1st May 2009
Targets have fallen out of political favour. But, as Tom Gash points out, it will not be easy to develop effective and acceptable alternatives
At first glance, the Conservatives’ rhetorical assault on government targets appears both politically expedient and practically sensible. In March, leader David Cameron told the Welsh Conservative Party that he would ‘get rid of all those targets, all that bureaucracy and all that paperwork and replace Labour’s bureaucratic accountability with democratic accountability’. Stories of police arresting children for playground scuffles, ‘teaching to the test’ and manipulating GP waiting times are now so widely known that the term ‘perverse consequences’ seems to have entered the media’s buzz word dictionary.
Say ‘targets’ and the mind also jumps to other examples of bad management: bureaucratic form-filling exercises, demotivating monitoring of professionals and high-profile failures, as seen in the case of Baby P. In fact, the case is so compelling that government has begun to get in on the act, dramatically reducing the number of targets for local government.
But, at the same time, any commitment to eliminate targets is ambitious. Targets help government to define priorities and to hold services and professions to account – and they can work. Target-based regimes for English hospitals, for example, ensured that waiting times declined far more rapidly than in Scotland and Wales, with limited, if any, systematic ‘gaming’. Targets can also be surprisingly attractive politically. While the anti-target brigade is pretty vocal, so are those campaigning for more ambitious goals for carbon emissions. In a media environment where promises are too often seen as action and the average minister remains in post for less than two years, why not get the plaudits for setting a target that you don’t have to deliver on?
Furthermore, ‘target-culture’ is so deeply engrained that removing national targets would be unlikely to deter local authority or primary care trust chief executives from setting their own. Admittedly, these might be more technically sound or better reflect local residents’ concerns. What then would it take for the Conservatives to make good on their promises, while also ensuring that we don’t return to the days where professional monopolies did as they saw fit?
Broadly, there are three approaches. Elements of each might be required to improve on current arrangements. The first, favoured by the Conservatives, is to provide people with more information and increased opportunities to choose their service providers. One example is shadow schools secretary Michael Gove’s early plans for a Swedish-style education system, which would increase choice by creating spare capacity and give parents powers to open schools. Parents, he argues, could vote with their feet to ensure that good schools could expand (or take over other schools), while poor ones would have to improve or face takeover or closure. The plan for directly elected police commissioners similarly aims to empower local residents, allowing them to oust underperforming police leaders at the ballot box.
Although attractive, such approaches can be problematic. Equity concerns are top of the list. Would the sharp-elbowed middle classes guzzle up all the good school places while children with less municipally active parents would be left languishing? Can our political culture really shift from one that decries ‘postcode’ lotteries to one that supports ‘picking winners’?
Another concern is that local influence might undermine efforts to tackle major national problems. What incentives are there for a locally accountable police commissioner in Bradford to tackle Islamic radicalisation, given that it is London and not Yorkshire that is most likely to be affected by a terrorist attack? And, in this context, will national politicians be able to resist the temptation to get involved in local issues when they are under attack from a nationally focused media? What’s more, many problems faced by government will require collective action. Crime reduction, for example, requires major contributions from local government, schools and hospitals as well as police action. As sources of accountability proliferate, is there a risk that co-operation between agencies will collapse?
On top of these political trade-offs, there is the practical problem of how to ensure performance information is accurate and can be used to inform public choice. The government’s implementation of little-used ‘crime maps’, for example, gives users no sense of the seriousness of crime committed unless they wade through inaccessible data tables, nor can residents see any meaningful data on police performance. Problems here are exacerbated by the fact that trust in all government data is notoriously low.
Service users and intermediaries can play a role in improving matters – firms such as ‘Doctor Foster’ are already providing the public with accessible information on hospital performance. But a need for central co-ordination might remain, perhaps through arm’s-length bodies such as the National Audit Office or the Office for National Statistics. Certainly, if a new government did scrap major performance frameworks, such as Public Service Agreements, some measures would be needed to ensure that powerful comparative information on performance is retained.
Given the difficulties of designing effective choice-based models, the government might still require some mechanisms defining national priorities as well as incentives for improvement in monopoly services. Without targets, this will require far more sophisticated forms of performance management than have been used before.
In this case, a second approach – the use of tournaments – appears attractive. These reward local areas for performing better than their peers. Designed well, they would use financial and reputational incentives to motivate local agencies to work together to tackle national priorities, such as teenage pregnancy.
They would avoid, too, the facade of ‘negotiation’ between national and local bodies. Recent Institute for Government research showed that public servants wasted months arguing about precise numerical targets. This cost the taxpayer millions of pounds but was soon deemed meaningless as changed economic circumstances made a succession of targets, such as house building and employment, unachievable. Because tournaments set areas in competition with one another, they would also be more likely to foster innovation, ensuring that areas focus on becoming exceptional and not just on reaching minimum standards.
Beyond tournaments, top-down methods, such as inspection, could also be refined. The introduction of Comprehensive Area Assessments, which look at how well local public service bodies are working collectively to improve outcomes, should be welcomed. More radical, though, would be to suggest that use of inspection should actually increase. The government’s moves towards a ‘risk-based’ approach, which focuses inspection resources on poorer performers, is sensible. But, despite its expense, inspection can add invaluable qualitative information to the hard performance data.
In place of – or complementing – this second alternative to targets is a third approach: a form of national leadership that is based on building system consensus and harnessing the energy of the public sector workforce. On the one hand, this could mean a return to social democratic models of consensus building, including potential innovation in public sector governance arrangements, welcoming professional bodies and unions back into decision-making processes. Could heads of professional bodies, for example, sit on Whitehall’s departmental boards – or peer reviews assume a greater role in government inspections? On the other hand, central direction might be achieved by a new emphasis on influencing and motivating rather than managing, perhaps applying the principles of behavioural economics to public sector workforces.
In this model, public sector managers would need to transform their mind-sets. They would need to learn to communicate more effectively through new technologies, renew emphasis on ensuring public sector jobs are intrinsically rewarding (particularly through better people management) and reinforce a sense of public service mission.
The style is not one that comes naturally either to the Sir Humphreys or the new breed of commercially minded public sector managers. Knowledge of how to build employee engagement, to harness frontline insights and innovation and to build staff advocacy therefore remains relatively weak. Indeed, according to a survey by staff at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, just 32% of all central government employees have confidence in their senior management and just 26% believe their department is managed well.
In combination, these three approaches offer genuine alternatives to target-based management. Yet, scrapping national targets while improving government is clearly not as easy as it at first sounds. Doing this requires some tough political and practical trade-offs, as well as a good deal of creative alchemy to develop and combine the approaches outlined here. If opinion polls are to be believed, the Conservatives might well have their chance to prove their mettle next year. The question is, will they have the energy and political restraint to resist pulling the big red lever labelled ‘target’?
Tom Gash is a fellow of the Institute for Government and lead author of the institute’s report, Performance art: enabling better management of public services
