Just Get On With It

Reader Robbie has sent in a pertinent comment on my post about Objectives, Targets:

Not sure I agree with you on the wider point about targets … Given the size and complexity of modern public service delivery, no Minister can reasonably be expected to have a strong sense of what is happening in all of their department, all of the time.

Therefore they need to identify priorities that need to be achieved for the benefit of the public, and by which the success of that Minister can be measured.

Once a priority has been identified, an outcome must be set (for without an idea of what the achieved outcome should be, the priority is meaningless). And once an outcome has been set, the department must set out how it will achieve that outcome. Progress towards that outcome is made in steps, which can only be measured by…targets.

It seems to me that if ministers don’t set targets, how can they be responsible for what their departments achieve (or fail to achieve)? And if ministers aren’t responsible for the success or failure of their departments, we have government by bureaucrat – unelected and unaccountable.

Value for Money: Government in a modern developed nation these days is a massive enterprise, which uses up lots of money. Unlike other organisations, it has the ability to decide how much money it needs; and can then (with relative ease) get that revenue (through tax hikes). Given that power, a responsible government must be able to prove it is spending its money in a way that gives value for money. How else can it do that except by showing progress against objectives?

Phew. Where to start?

No-one says that Governments should simply do what they damn well please with our money, even if often they do. So wanting to achieve specific things as promised in election campaigns is good.

My point is that the sprawling bureaucracy in the UK now associated with doing what Robbie proposes is choking intelligent government and public process. Much of it is in fact hilariously incoherent or even utterly stupid, or at the very best ‘merely’ distorting and wasteful.

And it is gnawing away at some of our most precious assets.

If we Brits have one global comparative advantage it is the English language, an amazingly clever, unrivalled tool for precision and clarity in communication in a new global era when Communication is Everything.

What else needs to be said for eg English in our schools other than "Pupils leaving school at 16 are expected to have read at least 50 of the 300 key books in Annex A and at least two Shakespeare plays. Marks will be deducted severely for poor spelling and grammar."? Then let schools just get on with it.

What do we actually get?

In effect the state for decades has nationalised most of the means of production of the English language, and as with all nationalised industries brought in clueless incentive structures and messed things up.

Each successive blunder leads to bad outcomes which in turn force civil servants to invent ever more elaborate schemes to try to solve the problem, which in turn make the problems worse.

The setting of Targets as opposed to Standards has led to teachers wasting massive time filling in forms while dwelling more on narrow exam outcomes and less on actual education.

Plus we see a stunning officially driven dumbing down in basic literacy, which now shows itself in almost every communication one receives.

Basically, Serbian and Polish children are learning good English to higher standards than ours are.

How bad is this?

I was lost for words a few years ago when an FCO fast-stream young officer and English graduate from Oxford University served me up a draft with the word ‘sebatical’ in it. What absence of education and basic reading and grasp of the way English works had produced that level of ignorance after some fifteen years in the better parts of the UK education system?

We now see the phenomenon of officials so gormless that not only can they not spell properly, they also do not grasp that there is a Spell-Checker on their computer or are unable to choose which of the options offered is the right one.

Another relatively new but growing official disease is Risk Management.

Embassies have to complete every few months a spreadsheet which lays out ‘risks’ to policy and the accomplishment of our Objectives.

The first demand for one of these arrived in Warsaw, attaching the Asia Directorate’s model as a splendid example. I crossly sent back an email saying that maybe, after everything which had happened in the Asia region not that long ago, a risk assessment which omitted the word tsunami might be thought to be a little … ridiculous? I predicted that in a few years’ time these banal exercises like so many others would have collapsed under the weight of their manifold contradictions.

I was told off for being ‘unhelpful’.

My answer, Robbie, is that there is no theoretical or operational basis for treating such time-consuming exercises within the current Objectives/Targets/priorities industry as being in any meaningful way meaningful.

Any honest risk analysis for any Embassy would put at the top of its list:

good chance that a domestic political drama will take Ministers’ eyes off the ball here and/or divert resources from our problems to other problems, probably for reasons driven by internal Party focus groups or Spin or Ministers’ own election prospects (a couple are in marginal seats with truculent ethnic minority communities)
non-trivial risk of Iran attacking Israel or vice versa, prompting vast global instability affecting for the worse everything we do

But if any Embassy in Europe wrote that, they would be told off for being unhelpful.

My recommendation to FCO staff?

Act! Boldly!

Seize all FCO/HMG papers you can find with the words Targets/Priorities/Risk Assessments/Strategies/Survey/Outcomes/Outputs/Road-maps on them.

Pile them in the centre of the FCO Main Courtyard.

Park the new Ministerial fleet of Ford Focuses a good way back for Health and Safety reasons.

Set fire to the paper mountain, dancing and cheering around the shooting flames. (Note: a tiny blow to FCO recycling policy and Global Warming, but hey, No Gain without Pain.)

March en masse to the Foreign Secretary’s office. Insist that he sign new FCO Basic Policy Guidelines:

Work flat out to stop the EU passing new Directives which harm British interests
Ditto to stop the UN sucking up to dictators and extremists
If necessary, threaten to stop paying for such nonsense, and mean it – Ministers will support you
Keep a close eye on the Russians, who play hard and tricky.
Ditto the French (less hard, even more tricky)
In fact keep a close eye on foreigners in general – they are often up to something tricky and/or hard
Climate Change needs attention, but don’t put all our eggs in one basket – the science keeps changing faster than the climate
End all ‘development assistance’ programmes – they waste money and encourage idleness/corruption
Never appear Weak
Be as helpful as you can to all UK business people who show up.
Ditto to Brits who have got into trouble
Don’t waste public money or cheat on your expenses – Big Trouble if you do
Now just get on with it