Targets can be useless… and dangerous!

I sat in a meeting this morning for over three hours examining the performance of public services across Staffordshire and couldn’t help thinking of Stafford Hospital and the failures in the basic running of the place.

Not because our committee is responsible for Primary Health scrutiny, it’s not, but because of a likely analagy. So many of the performance indicators in front of me this morning were either nonsense, meaningless or pointless. I wrote about Stafford Hospital suggesting that despite the range of different bodies looking at the operation none of them saw what was really happening until it was too late. They were clearly looking at wrong, or worse still, meaningless targets. Either that or the information, in the way it was presented, was skewed.

And it felt a bit like that at times today. There was detailed and, on the face of it, useful information on a range of indicators for public services in Staffordshire which we examine and ’send’ any concerns we have to other committees which deal in much greater depth with the particular service causing the concern. The county economy, some aspects of policing  and road safety to children’s health and educational results are just a few examples. Many targets are set by the County Council but what stood out were the ill-thought-through nature of many national indicators which are imposed by central Government via a body called Government Office West Midlands (GOWM). They are the Government Agency who are the ‘link’ between Whitehall and Staffordshire.

 And it was with those I saw some serious issues. If I’m honest, overall the impression to me is of a civil servant locked in a room and told to come up with a list of 35 measurements. ‘We want 35 targets Sir Humphrey and don’t come out until you’ve got them’. Well, the first 20 or so are pretty sensible and of genuine use but knowing there have to be that 35, by the time 25 has come and gone, they’re getting a bit odd… either what is being measured is useless or the way it is being done is meaningless. Expensive number crunching and data gathering for no useful reason. It seems that in relation to these the ’so what’ test has been missed. ‘What does this actually tell us’ became the comment from Members more and more.

Our committee this morning went through an entire hour, or near enough, of head in hands criticism of the point of some of these centrally imposed targets. And, to cap it all, these specific targets are completely presciptive down to every word and sentence in their description. There’s no room for any flexibility to make it better or dump it as a waste of time because the system from Government says that once the target is there, it cannot be changed even though GOWM also freely agree, on reflection,  it’s of little use.

Unecessary red tape at best and at its worst either chances missed to improve perfomance monitoring or utter failures because of looking at the wrong measures. I proposed bringing some of the Sir Humphreys from Government Office West Midlands before the committee to explain the shortcomings of their work… we can’t, in theory, compel them to appear but it will be interesting to see if they do agree.

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