Contribution from Bill Law

It once appeared that some guidance people could not think of anything to do, unless a target had been set for it. Targets seemed such a good idea at the time. Research-and-development projects were concluded with lists of targets which bore no recognisable relation to the evidence they adduced.

And now? Many targets have been set; fewer have been met – and life goes on. There may well be something more that we should be doing about targets; but in order to know what that is now, we need to understand why we got so over-excited about them then.

Professor-of-politics David Marquand is helpful. He traces the culture of targets to a late-twentieth-century loss-of-faith in public provision. He is talking about civil society - where, over the years, the likes of religious traditions, municipal parks, local clubs, civic schools, public libraries, helping professions, broadcasting and campaigning NGOs have been found. Civil society provides shared spaces, in which we gather ourselves to meet life’s pleasures and pains.

Public provision and civil society are, David Marquand admits, inchoate concepts. That doesn’t mean that they are meaningless or useless; it just means that they are dynamic and adaptive. In order to appreciate them you must look for a centre-of-gravity, there may be no clearly-defined boundary. But, in all its manifestations, civil society stands separately from - on the one hand - the market place, and - on the other - central government. What they offer cannot be accessed by the sort of consumer choices that individuals and families make; but neither can it be appropriately designed and controlled by national government.

Those who work in pubic provision, argues David Marquand, respond to argument rather than demand. They need to be approached in different terms than would be appropriate to (say) an estate agent. They have their own way of understanding what is going on and what should be done - whether professionally, scientifically or civilly. This means, I suppose, that they would not be easy to push around. And this is where, for most of its life, guidance was found.

So what happened? David Marquand, in an authoritative and – at times – refreshingly intemperate account, points to neo-conservatism. From it we got special versions of the enterprise culture, the case for competitiveness, the celebration of new technologies, an appreciation of globalisation and the claims of market forces. All were urged as a way of knowing how to shape a sustainable future - for families and for the nation. All, he says, was presented as a ‘there-is-no-alternative’ scenario. But, he argues, capitalism did offer alternatives. And our own commercial leaders were never convinced by the neo-con version; although it suited them not to voice too many doubts.

And so it was not too difficult to lead guidance into buying the analysis - lock, stock and policy agenda. Maybe we were not well-enough prepared; our DOTS analysis had clear places for individual choice and what came to be thinly labelled as ‘labour-market information’. But we found no place for the civic, social and cultural context of career.

So guidance made its moves, and there were consequences. Now in command, the neo-cons followed through with privatisation, marketisation, the weakening of local and civic provision, and all the apparatus of market making. By this time, guidance was hardly in a position to resist.

The marketing of a service needs information. That, argues, David Marquand, is why and how we got targets. Actually, provision was articulated in terms set by a whole raft of performance indicators: audits that identify deficits, outputs that could be measured, outcomes that could be verified, standards and targets that could be costed, league tables on which we could compete, and focus groups to tell us how to voice it.

David Marquand characterises the movement as ‘kulturkampf’ – a massive turn-round in the way in which we think – and talk - about what can be done. That struggle for dominance displaced an older language - of understanding - with a newer language - of compliance. Words and phrases, which articulated a shared search for clues about how to do this work, were lost.

David Marquand takes an academic’s legitimate pleasure in pointing out the contradictions, missing links, and non-sequiturs in all of this. It’s a good read.

But it leaves us with a serious task. We need a model for the use of targets – with a secure chain of probable causes and effects. At the moment it is not there. Know it or not, we are in real practical difficulties:

• our most vulnerable and needy clients are rarely in a position to exercise the kind of choice that targets imply;
• targets are arbitrary – unsupported by any evidence that meeting them means that people get a more useful and effective service; > they shape provision – providers become more interested in meeting the targets than in thinking about what would be useful; 
• targets distort provision – some user-needs are neglected because meeting them would not meet the targets;
• targets are centrally generated - offering little chance for local knowledge to modify the terms in which performance is validated; > choice is a mantra – we would do better to develop an informed and trusted argument that provision is as good as it can be.

This is not to abandon targets. There is a case for them: people have become worried and distrustful about public provision. The policy wonks who argue most ferociously for marketisation of public provision tend to reveal their own underlying distrust of providers. And professional providers are not sea-green innocents. David Marquand argues that public providers need to work harder at ensuring that people understand the-whys-and-wherefores of how a service is shaped. ‘Every client his or her own theoretician!' could be a worthwhile target.

So how do we move on? We must look again at the terms in which targets help and hinder. We must work out how targets relate to other ways in which provision can be understood by our clients. We need to understand how target-setting can usefully be articulated to local economic-and-cultural conditions. Before we were driven by targets we were driven by understanding; and when we understand more about how targets best help we will be in a better position to use to OECD reports urging targets.

David Marquand‘s book is The Decline of the Public - the Hollowing Out of Citizenship (Polity, 2004).