22 September 2006
A leading public finance expert has poured scorn on the latest attempt to establish a methodology for measuring service outcomes that will enjoy public trust, warning that official statistics are already beyond repair.
Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, told Public Finance that the consultation launched this week by the Office for National Statistics could actually erode trust even further.
The government body published a document on September 18 seeking views on the principles that should underpin the measurement of public service outputs and productivity.
But Travers said opening up such a debate risked undermining already hotly contested statistics, such as NHS productivity, to such an extent that they were rendered meaningless.
'I can see that, at the end of all of this, the conclusion will be that it's very complicated and we can't measure the relationship between inputs and outputs in public services,' he said.
'My fear is that we will never again have a usable definition of public service productivity in this country and, as a result, the debate about the state of public services will be eroded even further. That is a win for the government.'
The consultation paper has been drawn up by the external advisory board of the UK Centre for the Measurement of Government Activity, a directorate of the ONS set up following Sir Tony Atkinson's 2005 review of the issue.
The foreword to Measuring performance in our public services concedes the extent of the problem in finding an agreed methodology.
'Quantifying the output of public services, which for the
most part are provided free or at much less cost, is not straightforward,' it says.
'The public discussion needs to be wide-ranging so that no relevant considerations are missed out. But it needs to be a debate with an outcome helping us collectively move forward.'
Launching the consultation, national statistician Karen Dunnell said: 'These services represent in excess of £150bn a year, so providing accurate and reliable information about their performance is important.'
The consultation will run for 12 weeks and closes on December 11.
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