Targets: are they a good thing?
Alison West, former Chief Executive of NEC, talked on the subject of targets, looking at some of the practical and theoretical issues that they raise.
Read Alison's paper online below, or click here to download a copy of this talk. You will be asked to register on the site if you haven't already done so.
How can service providers set and achieve targets which make the most impact on improving the quality of life for ordinary citizens?
We have to begin by looking at the original purpose of both central and local government. Why were these systems of government set up in the first place? There are two main reasons. The first one is the legal side, where government prevents squabbles between different interest groups in society, where it stops the strong preying on the weak with no restraints, and in some countries reducing inequalities between its citizens. This area of government rests on a moral base and demands a constant discussion about the values by which we all, collectively, wish to live. Clearly, these change over time and actions that one age found acceptable become offensive (and therefore part of the remit of government) in another.
The second reason for government, and this applies particularly to local government, is the purely practical one, which is that collectively organised services are cheaper and more efficient than self-bought ones. From the emptying of dustbins to the replacement of street light bulbs, it is convenient for most people to have this organised for them by a level of government. This area of convenient organisation of services is relatively value free and the only reason to organise in this way is that it is crazy to do so on an individual basis.
When looking at this purely practical realm of local government there does need to be agreement about what targets to set in terms of services, agreement about how these are to be measured, agreement about how they will be reported on and to whom, agreement about how they will be both assessed and altered. We do not yet have this full range in relation to targets at present: what we are working with at the moment is a glorified customer feedback system and this presents some problems for the ‘ordinary local people’ who are the clients of local and central government organisation of services. What are these difficulties?
- Targets are seldom set by local people. They are set for them by professionals, for their benefit, on their behalf.
- There is a tendency at present to concentrate on the easy to measure and possibly on the easy to achieve and this is linked to the issue of who sets the targets in the first place.
- Targets are still very stuck in the professional subject areas that are traditional in the UK (education, health etc) and it is not clear what the combined effect of targets would be in any given locality.
- It is very hard to change targets once set in a professional area and it is often hard to do anything about it if the targets are not met. By and large the poor cannot vote with their feet e.g. by moving house if a local school is a substandard performer.
- There is a suspicion, at times justified, that the targets are fiddled when it comes to saying whether or not they have been met.
However, there is no doubt that no targets at all would be a far worse scenario. At least targets allow basic if crude comparisons to be made and if set after a good dialogue with the supposed beneficiaries can lead to more appropriate and responsive targets being devised. For example, the police in the West Midlands wanted to set service targets in relation to reducing gun crime but found to their surprise after good consultation that local people themselves, despite media hype, did not put this as a high priority at all and this enabled the service to look again at its targets.
Although the professions are slowly becoming better at setting service targets and at reporting back on them, there is no focus for a dialogue about the value decisions that lie behind most targets and it is even harder for local people to challenge these. For example, the current government stresses the need for an educational target in relation to the number of school age children reaching the higher grades in GCSEs. We could instead set a target of reducing the number of children who go on in later life to become criminals, or set a target to increase the number of pupils who are happy and well adjusted. Limiting the target to traditional academic achievement gives this a value above other factors that affect children’s lives, but this underlying assumption is not part of public debate, nor is there much of a system to allow people to chose between resources going into this target or going into the happiness target.
Not that this discussion of underlying values would be easy: even obvious targets with broad assent require a complex social discussion. We seek to reduce deaths from heart attacks and this seems like a common sense good thing to do. However, we could ask people whether the money spent on this should, instead, go on relieving the pain of the many more people who suffer from painful chronic illnesses for years. With limited resources, this decision is in fact being taken for us at present by health professionals when budgets are set, yet this is not part of the targets debate.
Under the current system of extreme simplification, there is a tendency for dramatic, particularly life-threatening, targets to win out over more subtle, more long-term but possibly also more valuable targets. We still do not have clear debates about what underlies targets. What, as a society do we value. What do we value compared to what else. How do we make choices about levels of value? What do we hold dear? Currently we do things the wrong way round. We set targets and then we extract from them the implied value system behind them. It would be better to reverse this, to decide what we value, then to set targets to support this value.
What is likely to happen in future in relation to target setting? Firstly, they are not going to go away and over time they will be used to set a basic floor of provision that will be standard and expected in every area. This will be universal and there will be less local unevenness of provision. Democracy will be enhanced by the ability of local people, using geographical analysis of provision, to check what their neighbourhood is actually getting and to make sure they are reaching their floor provision. They can also see if other areas are being disproportionately favoured. If they find disparities of provision, they are likely to exercise their democratic involvement by becoming disgruntled and by making demands on the allocation system.
Unless targets become more linked to the political process, this sort of thing cannot be resolved. If targets were linked in this way, ordinary people could set the non-basic targets on a local level, given general social agreement on the base of provision that every area would assume as a norm. If the democratic system matures, ordinary people will be more involved in the value decisions that precede the setting of targets. And there is no reason to doubt that this will happen. It would simply be a process of extending to the poor the sort of discussions about governance, about how society should operate, that the elite and the philosophers have been having since the Enlightenment. And it is about time that our democracy really started working as such.