30 April 2004
A series of key delivery targets across the public sector are likely to be missed, top civil servants admitted to MPs this week.
Under questioning from the Commons' Public Accounts Committee, David Normington, permanent secretary at the Department for Education and Skills, conceded that the government's English and maths targets for primary school leavers would be 'missed by a mile'.
'We're going to be significantly short of the literacy and numeracy targets,' Normington told the committee. 'Since 2001, progress has flattened and we're having great difficulty moving it on. It's going to be very hard to achieve.'
And Department for Transport permanent secretary David Rowlands said the target to reduce congestion on major roads to below 2000 levels by 2010 was 'deeply unsatisfactory and one we will not achieve'. He added that more sophisticated measures would be introduced to chart reductions in congestion.
NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp, who also gave evidence at the April 26 session, echoed the need for more sophisticated measures of progress. He said figures quoted in a Sunday Times article which found only a 2% increase in treatments for a 20% increase in investment, were misleading because they only took into account elective activity and ignored the wider picture.
Crisp also dismissed claims that the NHS was over-managed, saying that of the 59,000 members of staff who joined the health service last year, only 3% were managers.
Asked for the reasons behind the 'perception gap', whereby people feel public services are getting worse even though their own experience of these services has been good, Crisp said people were not connecting improvements to the extra investment. 'And we still have a long way to go. People are still looking at weaker areas,' he said.
All three permanent secretaries were wary of attaching blame for perception problems to negative press coverage. 'The local press write positive local stories,' Normington said. 'People often think things are improving locally but not nationally, and professionals are always looking ahead and often take for granted the point that they've got to.'
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