THE HEGEMONY OF STATISTICS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND ITS DANGEROUS CONSEQUENCES
By Marjorie Smith
The public sector in the UK faces a bleak future if the target culture still favoured by this New Labour administration, after 11 years in office, is not radically addressed and mostly jettisoned. The obsession with targets risks fatally undermining any sense of a public service ethos and by extension the consent of the electorate for the state to play a significant role.
As a probable consequence, the Conservatives could be presented with an opportunity to advance their well-concealed right-wing agenda and hand over vast swathes of public sector activity to private sector interests. Let us not be fooled by David Cameron's commitment to maintain public expenditure levels in the first two years of a Tory Government. Paying the private sector to deliver public services instead of public sector workers would still be classified as public expenditure.
Trumpeted as the way to make the public sector as 'competitive' as the private sector, target-setting has permeated nearly every aspect of public sector activity. Often put forward by private consultants (with their snouts deep in the Treasury trough) as the panacea for what, they allege, had become a moribund system of public officialdom which was incapable of responding to the challenges of an increasingly complex modern world.
Workers and management were supposed to respond to this brave new world by dropping, supposed, entrenched habits and providing outcomes that achieved the targets set. The process was accompanied by a brand new vocabulary that served only to make the rationale behind such initiatives more and more opaque.
Since winning power in 1997, New Labour has fallen hook, line and sinker for the idea that private sector target-setting can be successfully transplanted into the public sector in order to increase its efficacy. Minister after Minister, have "rolled out" target after target in their particular field of responsibility year on year.
Not withstanding that there are serious fundamental flaws about target-setting as a management tool in any field of activity, whether private or public, we, as citizens, are supposed to be reliably informed by the publication of statistics arising out of such public sector monitoring.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has recently suggested that schools may have to answer to eighteen new performance indicators (on top of the myriad of targets they have to measure themselves against currently, such as exam results and truancy levels). This is supposed to measure pupils' drug problems, pregnancy rates, criminal records, obesity levels, bully incidents and cases of neglect. The eighteen indicators are then intended to be aggregated so as to provide a comparative measurement capable, so it is intended, to identify problem schools.
We seem to have been intimidated by a business school mentality into blithely accepting that more and more target-setting is the only way forward for the public sector. It is as if any activity in the public sector should only be measured quantitively and that the quality of work undertaken is immaterial.
The abject failure to see beyond the figures produced by Government in collusion with the public sector senior management actually is the greatest threat to the future of public sector activity in this country. This is partly because the very same public sector management is normally made up of those who are most expert at producing the figures that Ministers and civil servants are looking for as the outcome of their policies.
Management by utilising econometrics is a weak and inherently poor method of management, were those who are prepared to be complicit in massaging figures the most adeptly are rewarded with promotions. This promotes a culture of deceit and cynicism that pervades an organisation and turns the target into the main raison d'etre of their activity, even if it blatantly contradicts what their organisation was originally set up to deliver.
The private sector is not immune from the corrupting influence of a target-led business culture. For example the recent scandals in the USA such as the collapse Enron and WorldCom were caused by a need to continually demonstrate increased shareholder values by manipulating results in order to achieve increased stock market price for shares at, as it turned out, any cost.
Children are no longer educated; they are trained to pass exams and tests. Hospitals first priority is not curing the sick, but achieving targets set by Trusts in response to Ministerial diktat. Tax is no longer collected in an equitable manner, it is raised from the easiest targets whilst the more complicated cases are ignored because they take too much time, use up more resources and, crucially, distort statistical results in a negative manner.
For example, the police are currently alienating a significant number of young people by issuing fixed penalty notices and cautions for a whole host of activities that would have been overlooked, or been the subject of a stiff talking to at most, in the past. This is not driven by some right-wing authoritarian regime, but by a public sector organisation that has been told to demonstrate an improved performance as a result of increased public investment.
There are two immediate negative results of such demands. Whilst clear-up rates have been improved demonstrably, with very small scale or non-existent crimes being included in official statistics, the actual real outcome is much more problematic. Large number of young people see a criminal justice system based on sophistry and what is blatant dishonesty, whilst the workforce itself is alienated by being complicit in such a cynical manipulation of official statistics.
This culture of manipulation of official statistics pervades many aspects of public life, from teaching to medicine (e.g. if you are not on a list then you can't be part of a queue when it comes to waiting times for operations). Those who can manipulate figures the most successfully are valued most by management and those who can see a wider picture are seen as trouble-makers incapable of adjusting to 'new challenges'.
We seem to have arrived at a situation akin to 'Soviet Five Year Plans' in the sixties and seventies. Like production figures for tractors in Volgagrad, as reported to Moscow, bore little resemblance to reality. Ministerial claims about success in this or that area of activity are increasing viewed as unreliable and having little meaning. This is especially true of official figures that people believe can be tested (albeit anecdotally) against reality.
The current official statistics about inflation and the separate figures on cost-of-living seem to bear little relation to real-life experience for most people. Large price hikes for food, domestic energy and road fuel amongst others seem to undermine claims that public sector wage increases are inflationary when they seen to be actually below the perceived real rate of inflation.
Governmental activity seems to be increasingly reliant on measuring its performance against figures that probably have increasingly less relevance as they become more and more subject to manipulation designed to produce the evidence desired.
This Labour Government needs to urgently address the culture of statistical deceit that is increasingly taking hold in the upper echelons of public sector management in this country What is actually at stake is the future of the public sector in the UK. Once the electorate lose confidence in Government statistics they will lose confidence in the very organisations that collect and collate such statistics. However, they will also lose confidence in the public sector as a whole and that is the greatest danger.
For what is the purpose of a Labour party which believes in an enabling role for the State if it is reduced to overwhelmingly relying on the private sector to deliver its policy objectives?
The public sector in the UK faces a bleak future if the target culture still favoured by this New Labour administration, after 11 years in office, is not radically addressed and mostly jettisoned. The obsession with targets risks fatally undermining any sense of a public service ethos and by extension the consent of the electorate for the state to play a significant role.
As a probable consequence, the Conservatives could be presented with an opportunity to advance their well-concealed right-wing agenda and hand over vast swathes of public sector activity to private sector interests. Let us not be fooled by David Cameron's commitment to maintain public expenditure levels in the first two years of a Tory Government. Paying the private sector to deliver public services instead of public sector workers would still be classified as public expenditure.
Trumpeted as the way to make the public sector as 'competitive' as the private sector, target-setting has permeated nearly every aspect of public sector activity. Often put forward by private consultants (with their snouts deep in the Treasury trough) as the panacea for what, they allege, had become a moribund system of public officialdom which was incapable of responding to the challenges of an increasingly complex modern world.
Workers and management were supposed to respond to this brave new world by dropping, supposed, entrenched habits and providing outcomes that achieved the targets set. The process was accompanied by a brand new vocabulary that served only to make the rationale behind such initiatives more and more opaque.
Since winning power in 1997, New Labour has fallen hook, line and sinker for the idea that private sector target-setting can be successfully transplanted into the public sector in order to increase its efficacy. Minister after Minister, have "rolled out" target after target in their particular field of responsibility year on year.
Not withstanding that there are serious fundamental flaws about target-setting as a management tool in any field of activity, whether private or public, we, as citizens, are supposed to be reliably informed by the publication of statistics arising out of such public sector monitoring.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families has recently suggested that schools may have to answer to eighteen new performance indicators (on top of the myriad of targets they have to measure themselves against currently, such as exam results and truancy levels). This is supposed to measure pupils' drug problems, pregnancy rates, criminal records, obesity levels, bully incidents and cases of neglect. The eighteen indicators are then intended to be aggregated so as to provide a comparative measurement capable, so it is intended, to identify problem schools.
We seem to have been intimidated by a business school mentality into blithely accepting that more and more target-setting is the only way forward for the public sector. It is as if any activity in the public sector should only be measured quantitively and that the quality of work undertaken is immaterial.
The abject failure to see beyond the figures produced by Government in collusion with the public sector senior management actually is the greatest threat to the future of public sector activity in this country. This is partly because the very same public sector management is normally made up of those who are most expert at producing the figures that Ministers and civil servants are looking for as the outcome of their policies.
Management by utilising econometrics is a weak and inherently poor method of management, were those who are prepared to be complicit in massaging figures the most adeptly are rewarded with promotions. This promotes a culture of deceit and cynicism that pervades an organisation and turns the target into the main raison d'etre of their activity, even if it blatantly contradicts what their organisation was originally set up to deliver.
The private sector is not immune from the corrupting influence of a target-led business culture. For example the recent scandals in the USA such as the collapse Enron and WorldCom were caused by a need to continually demonstrate increased shareholder values by manipulating results in order to achieve increased stock market price for shares at, as it turned out, any cost.
Children are no longer educated; they are trained to pass exams and tests. Hospitals first priority is not curing the sick, but achieving targets set by Trusts in response to Ministerial diktat. Tax is no longer collected in an equitable manner, it is raised from the easiest targets whilst the more complicated cases are ignored because they take too much time, use up more resources and, crucially, distort statistical results in a negative manner.
For example, the police are currently alienating a significant number of young people by issuing fixed penalty notices and cautions for a whole host of activities that would have been overlooked, or been the subject of a stiff talking to at most, in the past. This is not driven by some right-wing authoritarian regime, but by a public sector organisation that has been told to demonstrate an improved performance as a result of increased public investment.
There are two immediate negative results of such demands. Whilst clear-up rates have been improved demonstrably, with very small scale or non-existent crimes being included in official statistics, the actual real outcome is much more problematic. Large number of young people see a criminal justice system based on sophistry and what is blatant dishonesty, whilst the workforce itself is alienated by being complicit in such a cynical manipulation of official statistics.
This culture of manipulation of official statistics pervades many aspects of public life, from teaching to medicine (e.g. if you are not on a list then you can't be part of a queue when it comes to waiting times for operations). Those who can manipulate figures the most successfully are valued most by management and those who can see a wider picture are seen as trouble-makers incapable of adjusting to 'new challenges'.
We seem to have arrived at a situation akin to 'Soviet Five Year Plans' in the sixties and seventies. Like production figures for tractors in Volgagrad, as reported to Moscow, bore little resemblance to reality. Ministerial claims about success in this or that area of activity are increasing viewed as unreliable and having little meaning. This is especially true of official figures that people believe can be tested (albeit anecdotally) against reality.
The current official statistics about inflation and the separate figures on cost-of-living seem to bear little relation to real-life experience for most people. Large price hikes for food, domestic energy and road fuel amongst others seem to undermine claims that public sector wage increases are inflationary when they seen to be actually below the perceived real rate of inflation.
Governmental activity seems to be increasingly reliant on measuring its performance against figures that probably have increasingly less relevance as they become more and more subject to manipulation designed to produce the evidence desired.
This Labour Government needs to urgently address the culture of statistical deceit that is increasingly taking hold in the upper echelons of public sector management in this country What is actually at stake is the future of the public sector in the UK. Once the electorate lose confidence in Government statistics they will lose confidence in the very organisations that collect and collate such statistics. However, they will also lose confidence in the public sector as a whole and that is the greatest danger.
For what is the purpose of a Labour party which believes in an enabling role for the State if it is reduced to overwhelmingly relying on the private sector to deliver its policy objectives?
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