25 July 2003
The National Audit Office will need substantial new resources if it is given the job of assessing whether the government is hitting its plethora of service targets, as MPs demanded this week.
The public spending watchdog told Public Finance that auditing the government's performance against the targets set by every ministry would be a 'major undertaking', impossible within current budgets.
The need for independent validation was one of the principal findings of a highly critical report, published on July 22 by the Commons' public administration select committee, on the target culture across Whitehall.
An NAO spokesman told PF the organisation supported the committee's recommendation, but would concentrate first on auditing the way departments collate performance data, as the Treasury has already requested.
'We have no plans to examine whether departments are meeting targets across the board. We would anyway have to wait for Parliament to give us the extra resources we would need to take on this substantial new work,' he said.
'We approve in principle, but we think the developmental work should be done first.'
MPs demanded 'root and branch' reform of performance targets, which have been at the heart of the government crusade to transform public services. They want an urgent review, followed by a white paper published 'in good time' for the 2004 Spending Review.
They found that the obsession with targets is demoralising public sector staff, distorting service priorities and, in some cases, 'in danger of threatening standards'.
Their report cited the Bristol Eye Hospital as a case in point: 25 people went blind or lost some of their sight because managers, in their determination to meet targets for initial consultations, cancelled follow-up appointments for existing patients.
The target culture had also led to the manipulation of performance statistics. 'Creativity is being directed more to ensuring that the figures are right than to improving services,' it said.
The number of headline targets agreed between the Treasury and other ministries, set down in Public Service Agreements, has fallen to 123 in 2002 from 366 when they were introduced in 1998.
But committee chair Tony Wright said targets imposed by departments on frontline organisations were growing. 'The strong impression from the "sharp end" of services is that the burden of the measurement culture on frontline workers and their managers has increased.'
Committee members called on the government to slash the number of targets to 'the minimum necessary' and keep only those needed to guarantee 'key national entitlements'.
PFjul2003
