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If I should die, blame the top five performance indicators The
will to live is a wonderful if, at times, inexplicable thing. Mine deserted me
midway through this assignment. It just went. I was logged on to the Audit
Commission's web site. After a moment or two, this thin, silvery-grey,
wraith-like vapour exited through the top of my head, and suddenly I was half in
love with easeful death. So that's the will to live gone, then, I thought to
myself. It
had threatened to depart several times before. That's the problem with
researching an article about 'performance indicators'. In the end, they'll
smother you. But
there were laughs along the way, at least. My thesis - that performance
indicators are either useless or counterproductive took me to strange lands
inhabited by alien beings, but I was able to compile for you my top five utterly
fatuous performance indicators - examples which, even by the high standards of
the genre, stood out proudly. Let's
start with the health service. You may have read about the performance
indicators, or targets, that they have in the Department of Health. The doctors
hate them and are in revolt. Just this week it was revealed that patients are
banned from booking advance appointments with GPs so that surgeries can meet the
bloody stupid 48-hour waiting-time target. That's what I mean by counterproductive:
it has had, ineluctably, the opposite effect to that intended. The British
Medical Association has described the performance indicators as 'obscene'. Its
boss, Dr Ian Bogie, has suggested that doctors and managers have been forced to
collude in the manipulation of figures to the detriment of patients. He is right
- unequivocally so - but he should lighten up a bit. He ought to see the funny
side. Hundreds
of performance indicators have been imposed on hospitals and surgeries and some
of them are very humorous indeed, even if their effect is to make people more,
rather than less, ill. Stuff like the Day Case Rate: 'This indicator shows the
percentage of in-patients treated as day cases. This is one indicator of the
effective use of resources. Casemix adjustment takes account of variation which
can be attributed to differences in patients being treated.' You'll
be pleased to learn that the performance indicator for this has risen from
63.6 per cent to 64.9 per cent recently, according to a 'day-case rate for a
basket of procedures'. But what, you might ask, will be the effect in the real
world of an indicator that pressures hospitals into discharging in-patients
very quickly indeed? Will it be a beneficial effect, in the end? But
this is not my favourite Department of Health indicator. My favourite - and
straight into my indicator chart at number five - is the Data Quality indicator.
'This indicator provides a measure of the quality and reliability of data
underlying many of the performance indicators and serves as a proxy for
assessing general quality of data. . . . ' Yes,
that's right; you've got it. We glide smoothly into a profoundly surreal realm
with a performance indicator for the performance indicators. And you'll be
delighted to know that, once again, it went up last year. From 91.5 per cent. To
91.6 per cent. But
how do they know that the performance indicator of the performance indicator is
sufficiently reliable? Shouldn't someone set up a performance indicator for
whoever is charged with the task of setting performance indicators for the
performance indicators? Come on, you're getting a bit lax there, guys. Let's
move on. Let's have a look at the arts. And here we have a bunch of indicators
dreamt up by the Audit Commission, the Local Government Association, the
National Association of Local Government Arts Officers, the Chief Cultural and
Leisure Officers Association and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, in
terrible collusion with each other. I never knew that half those people existed.
But they do, they do. And they have come up with a vast sackload of fatuous,
entirely non-indicative indicators, under 19 separate subheadings, designed to
run localgovernment arts projects better. Beginning with this: 'The framework
initially identifies standards of service provider and supports the flexible
self-evaluation of arts services, locating them more securely within the
framework for comparative performance assessment.' I
must confess, I haven't a clue what any of that means - in theory or in
practice. And there's worse to come. My computer broke down trying to download
all of their indicators. It just went zzzp and ppphht and the screen went blank.
I tried to reboot the thing, but it went zzzp again in a resigned, plaintive
manner, so I left it alone. I tentatively peeked around the door later, and it
was quietly weeping. I'd
got as far as indicator number eight from section one of the 19 subheadings,
which was: 'The service is accountable and inclusive with a clear sense of
target groups (as defined by local priorities) and relevant and appropriate for
local residents.' Accountable
and inclusive, huh. But no mention, anywhere, of drama, music, dance or film. The
will to live left when I checked out the performance indicators invented by the
Commission for Racial Equality and the Audit Commission, a pretty lethal
combination, I think you'll agree. There's a long and doleful and apparently
non-satirical essay there about how local councils just haven't matched up to
the four and a half billion indicators imposed on them. This, at least, was good
news. Maybe they've failed because they don't understand a mission statement
which begins with the words, 'Mainstreaming equality and diversity - integrating
equality and diversity into day to day work and translating policy into practice
monitoring [their word] performance data.' Or frequent references to 'top-level
drivers', whatever the hell they might be. There
was one interesting little nugget buried away in this horrible document, though.
They ranked the various tiers of local government according to how slavishly
they'd complied with the performance indicators. The least compliant were
district councils and the most compliant London boroughs. Then they polled local
people about the councils they were most satisfied with. Guess what? The voters
were most happy with the recalcitrant district councils and least happy with
the London boroughs. Someone give me a statistician: I think we have a
correlation here. Here's
another one for you. As a result of Gordon Brown's Public Service Agreement, the
Foreign Office has a performance indicator that requires it to reduce the
number of poppies grown each year in Afghanistan. There's someone with a
clipboard in Kandahar even now, counting. And
- I promised you five - how about this: the Deputy Prime Minister's office
requires local authorities to increase 'public participation' by 5 per cent. It
does not say how or why or what it means by public participation. But I bet
the councils report back and say yep, done it. We've increased public participation
by 16 per cent, would you believe it. Meaningless
when not actually damaging, redolent of an overweening desire for central
control and choking in their fecundity, performance indicators are the
authoritarian fetish of the decade. New Labour loves them. Any political party
which promises to abolish them all - and the LibDems come closest on this score
- will get my vote next time round. by Rod Liddle. Reprinted from THE SPECTATOR 5 July 2003 CommentLib Dems remove government performance indicators? Rename them more likely. |
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