Target culture will fail on services, says watchdog

The new head of the national spending watchdog attacked the Government's culture of target-setting yesterday, warning that slavish adherence to national goals was a certain "a sure-fire way" of failing to improve services such as schools and hospitals.

James Strachan, chairman of the Audit Commission, told members of the influential Commons Public Administration Committee that while it was essential to set key targets, a proliferation of goals was "a very dangerous thing".

He said the Audit Commission and the National Audit Office should have a role in evaluating targets, and warned that people would not believe the outcome if ministers set targets, and monitored and validated their own performance.

He told MPs: "The slavish devotion to targets, many of which have not been set very intelligently, is a sure-fire way of not getting improvement in public services, and I firmly believe that."

Mr Strachan criticised "micro-meddling" in the work of the public sector and called for a more subjective approach to determining the performance of services.

He was speaking after Professor Michael Barber, the head of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, warned in a secret memo that there was an "immense risk" that the NHS would fail to take advantage of the Government's record increases to the health budget. Professor Barber is likely to be summoned before the committee next month as part of its inquiry into the Government's culture of target setting.

The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who is responsible for agreeing and monitoring targets for each Whitehall department, is also likely to be summoned to give evidence about the vast network of targets that control many aspects of government policy.

Evidence submitted to the committee by the Audit Commission said targets had brought benefits but called for a root-and-branch review to ensure that they were effective in promoting the Government's goals.

The document said: "On balance, there may be too many national targets. The first step to 'thinning out' would be to pull all the published targets across all service areas together and examine which of them best reflected the Government's stated policy priorities and public concerns.

"Too many targets are ephemeral and are replaced or just lapse because of changing short-term priorities."

The document echoed warnings by union leaders that targets did not reflect the full work of public bodies. "The focus on outcome targets, as important as this is, can obscure the 'quality of the experience' for service users," the document said.

"Shorter hospital waiting lists is an important target, but not if it means patients feel like widgets on a production line; patient care is important too, and much more difficult to measure," it said.

Auditors want to develop new measures of performance, linking standards in the health service to the "journey" of individual patients through the system rather than crude global performance measures.

Mr Strachan also criticised school league tables. He said: "Crude league tables on balance are very often more harmful than productive."

He said: "The reduction of targets to their true level of value is something we have do continue to think very hard about."