Analysis: From courts to sport, from education to global warming... Labour's moving targets become a millstone round its neck

It seemed a good idea at the time. When Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street in 1997, he had won a landslide victory after issuing a "pledge card" with five simple manifesto promises, his self-styled "contract with the people".

Why not, the Prime Minister and his advisers mused, extend the principle by setting key performance targets for Whitehall departments, to ensure they fulfilled the wishes of their new political masters? So the number of targets grew and grew. The Tories claim there are now more than 400 of them. The official number is 130, although that figure excludes some of Labour's goals.

Some targets served a real purpose. David Blunkett is adamant that the literacy and numeracy targets he set while Education Secretary were crucial in sending a signal to schools – and the wider world – of the Government's intentions.

Frustrated by the slowness of the government machine, Mr Blair believed that fixing targets would help crank it into action. But many targets were not thought through. Some were dreamt up by spin doctors for an easy headline, rather than mapped out by Whitehall policy experts. In the heady days of power after 18 years in the electoral wilderness, it did not seem to matter. But as time passed, the chickens started coming home to roost. Targets set for three or four years ahead were suddenly no longer on the distant horizon. Alarm bells began ringing in ministerial offices throughout Whitehall when they realised that many of their goals would not be met.

There are now real fears that the targets have become a liability. Having tried to roll forward, obfuscate or even deny some targets, ministers have begun to admit openly that some will never be met. On Tuesday, Mr Blunkett, the Home Secretary, abandoned three of the four key aims of the national drug strategy, admitting they were "not credible". He had already ditched plans to remove at least 30,000 asylum-seekers from Britain each year.

There is growing concern among ministers that failure to hit so many targets will undermine Mr Blair's central objective of turning round failing public services. After pumping billions of pounds into them, he is desperate for voters to see results before the next general election. But the lengthening list of missed targets is now providing precisely the opposite kind of headlines.

Some aims have proved so embarrassing that, until the recent outbreak of glasnost, ministers had tried to wriggle off the hook. In June 1997, John Prescott, who was Transport Secretary, set himself the target of reducing car traffic. Official figures show car traffic has risen 7 per cent since 1997. Although Mr Prescott no longer holds the transport brief, he is still Deputy Prime Minister. When reminded of the pledge recently, both he and the Department of Transport denied he ever made such a promise.

Other targets have backfired. In health, ministers have faced repeated charges that the relentless drive to cut waiting lists has distorted clinical priorities and even led to figures being fiddled. Targets have also helped to foster a culture of micro-management that extends the control of Whitehall officials down to the care of individual patients if they are at risk of breaking politically sensitive waiting time limits.

The sheer number of targets means that holding the Government to account has not been easy. Some goals have been superseded, merged or quietly dropped. Officially, the number has fallen from 300 in 1998 to 130 this year.

Some moving targets are extended so they never arrive. A variety of excuses has been deployed by ministers. Some targets have been described as "on track" when patently they were not.

The Home Office is one of the worst offenders. The Tories claim more than 20 key targets on asylum, crime and drug abuse have been abandoned or watered down without any announcement – including a promise in 2000 to reduce the economic cost of crime by 2004, a pledge to disrupt by 10 per cent organised criminal enterprises by 2004; and a commitment to cut violent crime, burglary and car crime by 2004.

Another tactic is known in Whitehall as "BSE" – Blame Someone Else. When he became Home Secretary last year, Mr Blunkett was warned by Home Office officials that many of the drug targets he inherited from Jack Straw would not be met. Rather than blame his predecessor, Mr Blunkett turned his fire on Keith Hellawell, the Government's former "drug tsar" (who, conveniently, left his post earlier this year). He accused Mr Hellawell of picking figures "out of the air" when he set the targets in 1998.

Some targets are set over such a long period that today's ministers will almost certainly have departed before they are due to be hit. For example, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, promised to abolish child poverty in 20 years and halve it in 10 years. During last year's general election campaign, Mr Brown claimed that more than a million children had already been lifted out of poverty. The official figure, published after the election, was about 500,000. Now the Government is considering whether to revise the way poverty is measured, which could provide a get-out clause.

Not all ministers are cavalier towards the targets. They were a factor in the sudden resignation of Estelle Morris as Education Secretary in October. The Tories dug up a little-noticed pledge she made when Schools Standards minister that she would quit if the literacy and numeracy targets were not hit. Their attack added to the pressure on Ms Morris, already reeling from the A-level fiasco and cabinet battle over university top-up fees.

Downing Street and the Treasury now acknowledge the limitations of the targets regime. "We over-egged the pudding," one minister admitted. "In some cases, setting targets was a substitute for having a proper policy."

The Treasury, which successfully fought off an attempt by the Cabinet Office to take over progress-chasing on targets, was keen at first to cut the budgets of departments that failed to meet their goals. But this proved unworkable, since failure to meet the standards was sometimes due to a lack of cash. Paul Boateng, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, conceded in July: "We are not in the business of holding back money in that way."

Ministers also admit that target setting contributed to the over-centralised system of government adopted in Mr Blair's first term. Frontline staff were sometimes left bewildered by a blizzard of directives and targets from Whitehall. Now a U-turn has been quietly completed. The Government will set broad standards, which will be monitored independently, but public-sector managers will get much more freedom in how to deliver the services.

Despite the rethink, many targets remain on the books and the opposition parties scent blood. The Tories claim that last week's pre-Budget report showed that Labour had missed almost 40 per cent of the targets it set in 1998 and had failed or was on course to fail to meet 75 per cent of the goals it set in 2000.

Michael Howard, the shadow Chancellor, said yesterday: "Public Service Agreements [PSAs] introduced in 1998 were Labour's guarantee that increased public spending would be matched by improvements in the public services. Funds would only be given to departments on the basis of results. Wasteful tax and spend was history.

"The latest figures show that PSAs are being failed, but the money is still going in. This is at the heart of Labour's failure to deliver improvements to public services. Increased spending has not been tied to reform as Labour promised."

The Liberal Democrats have also long made Labour targets a focus of their attacks on the Government, with a team of researchers gaining a formidable reputation for making political hay out of performance information now detailed in annual and half- yearly reports.

Mark Oaten, chairman of the Liberal Democrats in Parliament, said: "New Labour's obsession with targets is typical of its control freakery. It has often had unintended consequences. It has led to attention being focused on less important areas of policy at the expense of more important ones. This has certainly been the case in both education and health since 1997. We need less targets and more trust in local people."

Downing Street insists that the Government is on course to meet nine out of 10 of its targets. Ministers argue that they would have been criticised still further had they met all their goals – because people would have regarded them as a cynical exercise in electioneering rather than a genuine attempt to improve public services.

Professor Michael Barber, who invented the literacy and numeracy targets while head of the standards and effectiveness unit at the Department for Education and Skills, now heads the Downing Street Delivery Unit, playing a leading role in attempts to drive up the performance of public services. He defends the concept of target setting, insisting that the public would see the results of improvements in the data flooding into his small office off Whitehall. He told the Public Administration Select Committee: "Clearly getting targets well designed and not having too many is important, that is the first thing. Personally, I think the targets that have been developed over now two spending reviews, and the third one about to come through, provide clarity about what the Government is seeking to achieve, which is after all what a target is."

Geoff Mulgan, who heads the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, said: "It is very important that we understand that they [targets] are tools to support judgement; they are not substitutes for judgement. The heart of the job of a minister or an official is to make judgements in often quite complex, quite uncertain situations. Good targets make it easier to make the right judgements but they are not a substitute."

THE COURTS

In Labour's 1997 manifesto, it promised to "convict more criminals". Last year, it pledged to "bring to justice" 100,000 more crimes by 2004. But the most recent figures show there has been a fall in convictions of 80,000. This made the pledge of bringing to justice 1.2 million offences by 2004 unrealistic. Ministers have chosen to extend the target by two years so that they will not have to meet their pledge until after the next election.

NHS WAITING LISTS

Cutting NHS waiting lists by 100,000 was one of the first commitments made by Frank Dobson, then Health Secretary, in 1997. For 18 months they continued to rise before the tanker finally turned, in Mr Dobson's phrase.

Labour achieved the target well in advance of the 2001 election, but the lists have begun to creep up again and, at 1,048,100 in September, are only 50,000 below the 1997 figure.

PRIMARY SCHOOLS

Failing to improve primary school performance by 2002 was the benchmark by which David Blunkett and Estelle Morris famously promised to resign. In September the Government failed to meet two targets on attainment by 11-year-olds in maths and English. The latest target is to ensure that 85 per cent of 11-year-olds reach level four or above in national tests and increase to 35 per cent those gaining level five by 2006.

SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Ministers are in effect racing against time after setting a batch of targets for performance at 12, 14 and 16, as part of 36 hugely specific and challenging targets for schools, colleges and universities.

The proportion of 16-year-olds with at least five good GCSEs should be 20 per cent by 2004 and at least 25 per cent by 2006. There are also targets to reduce truancy by 10 per cent by 2004. Previous targets have not been met.

HIGHER EDUCATION

Plans to get 50 per cent of people aged 18 to 30 into higher education by 2010 have shone an unwelcome spotlight on university funding. The current rate is just under 40 per cent. Critics dispute the need for so many young people to gain a degree, and fear it could lead to a devaluation of the qualification. Others argue that any move to introduce university top-up fees would make the target impossible to achieve.

STREET CRIME

Tony Blair said last year in what was seen as a rash move that it would be "under control" in a year. The Home Secretary admitted last month only half of 10 urban forces had reduced robberies and thefts. A £31m initiative was seen as a success by ministers as overall offences fell from 46,415 to 41,797. It had greater success in recruiting police. Mr Blunkett even upped the target last month to 132,500 in 2004 from 129,603 now.

FIRES

As if it didn't have enough problems on this front, the Government has to reduce deaths in the home caused by fires by 20 per cent over five years. The pledge, made in 1998 and renewed in 2000, involves cutting the average number of deaths in the five years to March 2004, compared with the five years to March 1999, from a starting point of an average 380 fire-related deaths a year. In 2000, 392 people died in fires.

SUICIDE

There is one death from suicide every two hours, or just under 5,000 a year. Ministers launched the first national suicide prevention strategy in October and set a target for a 20 per cent cut by 2010. Suicide is the most common cause of death in men under 35. In the past 20 years suicides have fallen in older men and women and remained constant in younger women. But rates have risen 172 per cent among younger men.

ARTS

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport aims to increase by 500,000 the number of people experiencing the arts by 2004. Progress has yet to be assessed towards the target, set in 2000, although a goal set in 1998 to create 300,000 "new opportunities" to experience the arts by this year has been met. The target focuses on people attending two or more arts events each year. Popular music is not defined as an art.

SPORT

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport set a target to increase the time spent on sport by those aged 6 to 16 from an average of eight and a half hours a week last year to nine hours a week by 2004. Pupils spending five hours a week or more on sport during the summer holidays must rise from 66 per cent to 71 per cent by 2004, and those spending less than an hour a week on sport must fall from 10 per cent to 8 per cent.

ADOPTION

Few children are adopted from the care system. The Government set a target in 2000 to increase the 2,710 adopted in that year by 40 per cent by 2004.

It is well on the way to achieving the target. Latest figures published last month show adoptions up by 26 per cent to 3,400. The Adoption and Children Act, passed last month, will extend the range of people able to adopt, giving a further boost.

CHILD POVERTY

Tony Blair promised to eradicate child poverty within a generation – or 20 years – in 1999, and halve the number of children in poverty by 2010. Gordon Brown claimed before the election that 1.2 million children would be lifted out of poverty by measures introduced before 2001. But poverty figures to April last year showed that the actual number of children brought out of poverty had been only 500,000.

TREATING OFFENDERS

The Government has introduced targets for its rehabilitation programmes after some of its initiatives have been completely ignored by the courts. But only 839 sex offenders were put through treatment in the financial year to the end of March 2002, despite a target of 1,160.

Targets for 20,000 offenders to complete "intensive group work programmes" in the current financial year have had to be revised to 12,000.

LIGHT RAIL USE

The Department of Transport set itself the aim of increasing the numbers of light-rail and tram passengers by 50 per cent between 2000 and 2010. But with few cities and towns drawing up firm plans to increase use, the target has been revised to a rise of 12 per cent for the combined use of light rail, trams and buses. The department said its new target was more flexible to allow for individual cities' transport needs.

CAR USE

A month after the 1997 election, John Prescott, the Transport Secretary, said: "I will have failed if in five years' time if there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car." On the fifth anniversary of that promise, the volume of car traffic had risen 7 per cent, while bus use was unchanged, government figures showed. Ministers said increased car use was proof of the economy's vigour.

ANIMAL DISEASE

Having made much of the Tory government's disarray over mad cow disease, Labour set itself a target in 1998 to "prevent outbreaks of serious animal, fish and plant diseases by 31 March 2002". After the world's worst foot-and-mouth epidemic, the target has been abandoned. The Government also missed its pledge to increase British beef exports and admits an aim in 2000 to reduce the annual incidence of BSE has "shown some slippage".

VOTER APATHY

Ministers pledged in 1998 to modernise polling, including by increasing levels of voter registration, to encourage local election turn-out. In June, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said the target had been met. Four weeks earlier, turn-out in town hall elections had been patchy, despite new electronic and text voting. Turn-out at last year's general election was 59 per cent, the lowest peace-time figure since the early 19th century.

ARMED FORCES

Despite recruitment campaigns, including taking on thousands of foreign-born soldiers, the Ministry of Defence has failed to meet targets for personnel numbers. By 2001, it had promised, the Army would be at 95 per cent strength, the Royal Navy at 98 per cent and the Royal Air Force at 100 per cent. The Army is now aiming for 97 per cent strength by the end of 2005. The latest figures show it still 8,000 personnel short.

THIRD WORLD HUNGER

Cutting the proportion of people living in poverty to below 48 per cent across sub-Saharan Africa, from 15 per cent to 10 per cent in East Asia and the Pacific and from 40 per cent to 35 per cent in South Asia by 2006 is a difficult task for the Department for International Development. It also aims to increase enrolment in primary schools, cut infant mortality, increase the number of births aided by midwives and combat HIV and Aids.

GLOBAL WARMING

A target set in 2000 aims to improve the environment and the sustainable use of natural resources by using energy-saving technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5 per cent below 1990 levels. Ministers want to move towards a 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2010. The Government says it is on course, with greenhouse gas emissions in 2000 13 per cent below 1990 levels.