Coronavirus: The problem with politicans missing the target

Matt Hancock pledged to reach 100,000 Covid-19 tests by the end of April – but official targets are best avoided, writes Sean O'Grady, not least because you risk missing them

The health secretary created a statistical rod for his own back (PA)

Will the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, hit his target of 100,000 tests for coronavirus by the end of the month? Was it wise? Does it matter?

When, on 2 April, Mr Hancock, after much media pressure, unveiled his ambitious goal to take coronavirus testing from around 10,000 a day to 10 times that figure, he created a remarkable statistical rod for his own back. He did not have to do it, despite the poor reviews the government was receiving for its failures on testing. Yet he did so, by his own witness, to discipline himself to strain every sinew to get there, and to galvanise the entire machinery of the state, including the army.

In due course a “testing tsar”, Professor John Newton, was appointed, and has expressed confidence that the target will indeed be met. One cabinet minister, George Eustice, has said that the capacity for 100,000 tests a day is already in place. Another, Dominic Raab, has downgraded the target to an “aspiration”. Now, new drive-in centres have been announced, postal testing and web bookings opened up, and eligibility for testing has been widened to all key staff and people over 65. The actual number of tests taken remains far behind the goal. There is something of a pattern of successive failures on testing to be answered by the unveiling of ever more ambitious new targets. As a media strategy it has had some success.

If Mr Hancock does hit his target he can declare a kind of victory, even though the British record on testing is poor by some international comparisons (notably Germany and South Korea), and even though it has contributed to the UK heading for one of the worst casualty rates in Europe.

But if Mr Hancock fails in his quest he can plausibly argue that the country would not have made the progress it has on the face of global shortages of testing kits had he not set the bar so high – a noble failure. If, say, he had set the target at 50,000 tests per day then we might now only be on, say, 40,000 a day. Or we might have got to say 50,000 which would reach the target but fall short of where we now are.

As to whether it matters, the sheer scale of the emergency and the past lack of planning and preparedness almost leave target-setting irrelevant. As it happens Mr Hancock, with a supreme effort by the NHS and a well observed lockdown, did manage to avoid a critical shortage of ventilators and properly staffed intensive care beds in the first wave of cases. That broader success meant that nobody much noticed when Mr Hancock’s mid-April ventilator target of 18,000 was missed; and little is now heard of the final target of 30,000 ventilators.

According to the government’s quietly published “update” on Tuesday: “The UK now has 10,900 mechanical invasive ventilators available to the NHS, as well as 4,300 non-invasive devices.” Only now has the first of the Ventilator Challenge models, produced by a consortium of British firms, been approved for use and 15,000 ordered. Yet it is not for the moment critical, and Mr Hancock received little praise for the disaster averted: how short memories are. It is a demonstration of the difference between aiming a target for its own sake (ventilator numbers), rather than as a means to an end (avoiding needless deaths).

Perhaps more surprisingly, not that much has been made of the 20,000 deaths that Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific officer once said would be a “good outcome” even as some experts predict the eventual total tally could reach 40,000.

On the whole, precise targets with precise deadlines are best avoided, leastways from a purely political point of view. When Boris Johnson issued his own target for 250,000 tests a day on 19 March, he attached no timeframe to it beyond a general pledge to “turn the tide” in 12 weeks. He is far too shrewd a politician, and experienced a journalist, to commit himself to anything so accountable as a hard deadline.

He may have also had in mind probably the single most missed, refined, spun and discredited target in recent British political history – David Cameron’s pledge to restrict immigration to the “tens of thousands”, which The Independent campaigned against and which was eventually dropped. Though it might have appeased some in his party and attracted some votes back in 2010, the 100,000 limit/target/goal/aspiration, never hit, and had the unfortunate effect of highlighting the EU’s principle of free movement of labour, thus fuelling Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. It did nothing for trust in politics, and indirectly destroyed Mr Cameron’s career. Much the same could be said of his and the May and Johnson governments’ constantly missed, shifting and postponed targets for reducing the national debt.

Official targets tend to suffer from statistical manipulation, people gaming the system, and the march of events, as with many of the New Labour targets on child poverty, NHS waiting lists, and university access. Periodic economic crises have also derailed post-war British governments efforts on, among many others, social house building, the rate of inflation, the number of unemployed and raising the school leaving age.

In fact one the most remarkable of political phenomena is a worthy target, clearly defined and sustainably achieved. The UN-mandated target of devoting 0.7 per cent of our national income to overseas aid has miraculously survived a decade of unremitting hostility from elements of the governing party, who are even now arguing to have it subsumed into the defence budget (which is barely keeping up with its own Nato-agreed target level). It stands alone, however.