House of Commons - Public Administration - Appendices to the Minutes of Evidence

66. Could I welcome Sir Michael Bichard as our witness this morning. I am tempted to say once more meeting like this because you are a regular attender at our sessions, for which we are very, very grateful. The fact that we keep asking you back means that we like what you say, or at least you challenge us with what you say. I suppose we thought that now you are a free man you might speak even more freely to us than you had been able to before. Whichever inquiry we are on we seem to want to know what you think about it. We are now doing an inquiry into targets, measurements, league tables, all that kind of thing, government by measurement. We want you to tell us your experience of working that system, what you think about it and any alternative approaches that may be helpful. I think you have something to say to us by way of introduction.

(Sir Michael Bichard) I thought it might be helpful if I just said a few words around targets and tables and we can take the discussion from there. I am not going to go through this line by line but basically what I am saying is that I think targets and performance tables and measurements have an important part to play in improving public services. That is because they focus energy and effort and they enhance accountability but both of them, I think, carry risks and dangers, which is obviously why you are having this inquiry. I think it is important to learn the lessons of experience. As far as targets are concerned those lessons are, amongst others, that targets are best if they are set by people who have actually been involved in delivering operations and targets, and that is not always the case in government. I think, and I am sure that you have come to this conclusion anyway, that they should be small in number. I say that with the benefit of experience having led the Benefits Agency for five years which had 152 targets. It is quite difficult to focus 65,000 people on 152 targets. I think that they should be largely outcome based and certainly not about process. They should be measurable and they should be expressed in terms of client needs. I think too many public service targets do not address the client need and, therefore, do not have much ownership from clients or from staff. Obviously, and again it is a basic point, they should be stretching but achievable. It is important because unrealistic targets do not raise performance, they just demoralise people and sometimes lead to poorer performance than you started out with. There are several points around review which I think are quite important. The way in which the targets are formulated needs to be regularly reviewed because over a period of time any target can begin to distort behaviour and over time any target can be manipulated. I think the formulation of the targets needs to be regularly reviewed and regularly refreshed. I think also the management of the targets itself needs to be regularly policed and audited because especially if you are linking targets to paying bonuses then there is an incentive there for people to fiddle the targets to enhance their salary, therefore there should be clear auditing arrangements. We had serious problems with the Employment Service many years ago when there was less than honest management of the target regime that was in place at the time and the Chief Executive had to be very brave in saying "This is not acceptable. We are going to root this out and approach these in a totally honest way". I think targets have got to cover all levels of delivery. It is absolutely hopeless to set a national target and then just tell local delivery units to go away and achieve those because they have got no idea what that national target means in terms of their performance, what they need to do to improve so that the national target is achieved. I think you need the target set at all levels. They should not be so detailed as to strangle any scope for creativity. Once you get really detailed targets which prescribe precisely how things should be done rather than what you are expecting the outcome to be then I think you take away the scope for innovation and creativity which seems to me to be one of the great keys to public service reform and improved service delivery, which I actually think is a major problem in this country at the moment. The lack of creativity in public but also private sectors is a real issue. The targets need to be owned by staff. That means you need to involve staff in setting the targets. They need to be influenced by clients and by the wider community, so consultation with staff and community consultation is very important. Obviously they need to be rigorously monitored and reviewed. I say "obviously" but I think senior management can send very strong messages by personally being involved in reviewing the performance against targets and making it absolutely clear that the senior management is committed to delivery. I think there are only two other points to make, and they are more general points but they are really rather important. I do not believe that targets can ever tell the whole story. They are important, they can be a good focus, but we should never believe that they can tell the whole story. Some people say the problem with targets is that they deflect attention from all the other things that are going on in an organisation. There is that danger but without them I think people are unfocused and tend to concentrate sometimes on the trivialities, the things that matter to them personally which are not necessarily what matters to the client and the organisation. On balance, again, I think targets are a good thing but they cannot tell the story. Finally on targets, and I know this is almost a waste of time making the point, I do worry about the media response to performance against targets. If I was in government I think I would be increasingly cautious about setting explicit targets simply because I think the media response to a target which is missed even by a small amount is that this is a complete failure. I do not think in the private sector and in the best parts of the public sector that is how it would be perceived, and that is not how it should be perceived. If you are setting stretching but achievable targets, probably 50 per cent of the time you are going to miss them, hopefully just, but you will achieve a great deal more than you would have done if you had not set them. I think the media response to things like literacy and numeracy targets, you will not be surprised to hear me say it, saddens me. I do not want to say much on performance tables, again I think there are advantages and disadvantages. They are powerful but then weapons are powerful and they can do good and they can do harm. I think they can encourage better bench marking, a sense of competition, which I still think is important in a largely monopolistic system. They do enable clients, customers, citizens, whatever you want to call them, to ask questions and I think we in the public service should be prepared to provide answers to reasonable questions. On the other hand, it is quite difficult for tables to take account of external factors. The particular local social pressures are often not reflected in national performance tables and they do not very effectively measure the distance travelled by a delivery unit. It is too easy for those delivering in areas which do not suffer deprivation to be always at the top of the table and therefore feel pretty complacent, but on many occasions they are not stretching themselves. Tables can be demoralising for some because they do not reflect the pressures under which they work and they can encourage complacency in others. Of course they need to measure the things that matter and the data on which they are basing these needs to be reliable. There are advantages and disadvantages. I still believe that they have a part to play in enhancing accountability. I think they have played quite an important part in enabling people, parents not least, to ask some questions which ten, 15, 20 years ago they could not ask.

67. That is really very, very helpful. Thank you for giving us the note too. I suspect all those issues we shall want to pursue in so far as we have got time to do that. Can I just pick up on the very last point you were talking about because of your own particular experience. I have been reading a letter that I have had from a primary school head teacher in my constituency. She is a dynamic head, came into teaching mid career, absolutely committed, all the school leadership qualifications in sight, works in a primary school in an ex-pit village with committed staff, gets brilliant OFSTED reports and then she writes "Every year we get the SATs tables published and our school is utterly demoralised again and it sets us back, all the stuff we have done during the year". How do I write back to her?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think you write back sympathetically. I will not preface every answer with this but Members must appreciate I no longer work in school based education, I am no longer in government, I have not been for 18 months, and therefore the answers that I give are personal answers.

68. That is what we want.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I would be sympathetic. I would like to think�I am not quite sure where the department is on this�that we could move to a position where league tables reflect the value added because I think it is sad that some of our really good schools operating in the most difficult circumstances do not get a chance to shine because the kids are coming from backgrounds which make it very difficult for them to deliver academically as well as some other children. I would like us to be moving towards added value, so I would rather you find out where the department is in terms of that because there is work going on.

69. We have been talking about value added for years and years and yet we still have the crude league tables.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think you can have both. I am not suggesting that value added should take over entirely but I would like to see some value added statistics reflected. It does take a long time to get to that point because you need a long reliable run of data and, of course, until the early 1990s we were not keeping data because people said you could not measure what really mattered in education. The thing that one has to say to head teachers sympathetically but firmly is that for a very long time parents and others with an interest in the system had no way of asking questions about performance of the school. It is difficult in those circumstances but I think heads need to be robust in answering those questions. I know how difficult it is but if I were her I would be seeking over a period of time to get the press and the community to fully understand the pressures that she is facing so when the results came out particularly the press were covering it in a mature and responsible way. Locally I think that is possible, local press tend to support local schools and are more likely to attack government and attack the fact that there are performance tables. I do not think it is a lost cause in trying to develop an understanding locally of the pressures under which you are working and the value that you are adding and the progress that you are making. I am sure that head over a period of time has made progress and she should be putting that into the public domain as well.

70. Thank you for that. I will try a letter of that kind.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Give her my regards but preferably not my mobile number!

71. I am interested in what you said about the Employment Service and basically the cheating around targets. We have had the recent report through the Guardian of the cheating around SATs. Is it the case that if you have a target regime cheating is endemic to it, or is it just the case, as you said in your opening remarks, that we need better policing?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Human nature is human nature and I think there will be some people with a large organisation who will look to find ways of manipulating, if not cheating, targets and therefore you do need to have systems in place which ensure, in so far as is possible, that is extremely difficult and you are checking up on it. I do not think there need to be sophisticated audit checks but people need to know that checks are being made. Nothing comes without risk, as I said at the beginning, so there are risks. I do not think it is inevitable but sometimes we have not put in place all the systems which are sufficient so we have ourselves to blame. I think it can be policed adequately.

72. Let me ask one last thing before I hand over. When I read you over the years and I listen to you today, a sub-text�not a sub-text, a text�a text always is that there are people around government who do not really understand how organisations work, they have never really done it. I suspect that you have got your eye on some of the young scribblers in Number 10 and you have probably got your eye on the Treasury. When you wrote about this some time ago you were talking about the PSAs, and of course that is code for the Treasury, and you said "PSAs are an irrelevance to the best managed departments and no more than an irritant to the rest".
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think they were, I do not know what has happened in the current round, which is where I am not as helpful as you would want me to be. Let me cover some of those points. I have not complained about the "scribblers", as you put it, at Number 10. I always worked pretty well with them and I think they are high quality people, it is often a question about getting them involved at an early enough stage. I do not complain about that. What I do complain about very firmly is that I do not think there are enough people at the centre of departments who understand the issues that we are talking about today. I do not believe that they have sufficient sensitivity and experience of operational delivery, for example, to be able to set targets of the kind that I have been talking about. Looking back on it, it looks to me rather like a holding company which is almost entirely populated with people who have never actually managed on the ground and that is quite a dangerous situation. It is really the centre of departments�I am sure that all of this has changed dramatically over the last 18 months since I last experienced it�where I have most concern. As far as the Treasury is concerned and PSAs, my concern about PSAs in their early form was that they were almost being presented as a substitute for business planning, that really all you needed was a small set of targets, they were in the PSA and you got your comprehensive spending money and then they were reviewed. Unless they were, as I have put it, dropping out of the business plan, unless you did the background work which enabled you to focus down on this small number of key targets then many of them were just cobbled together to buy off the Treasury. I do not think that was an adequate response. The way in which they were monitored thereafter was not as rigorous a system as I was suggesting in my opening statement that you should have. As I say, that may have changed but what I wanted to see in place was in every department there to be a very focused business plan from which would fall out your small number of PSA targets and your business plan would be managed, monitored rigorously within the department and the Treasury and the Cabinet Committee would monitor rigorously your performance against your PSA targets. I think a lot of the words were in place, a lot of the rhetoric was fine, but I did not find that the process often matched the rhetoric.

Chairman: Very good, thank you.

Sir Sydney Chapman

73. Sir Michael, if I may say so you continue to have a fascinating career. I remember you as Chief Executive of Brent at one time, I think.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Thank you for reminding me of that, Sir Sydney.

74. It is an area where I have the privilege to represent but not in the same borough. In 1990 you were appointed chief executive of the Benefits Agency.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

75. When were you appointed permanent secretary to the Department of Employment?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Employment in 1995 and the joint department at the end of 1995.

76. So you were not chief executive of the Benefits Agency when these 152 targets were set?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes, I had 152 targets.

77. You had 152 targets?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

78. They were just presented to you, were they? What I am fascinated to know from your great experience is can you tell me a little more how targets are set. If we are going to judge whether targets are a good thing or not we have got to know if it is the politicians who take the lead in setting them or the civil servants or whoever. What I am interested in is even if it is the politicians or the civil servants there must be an inbuilt incentive not to set the targets too rigorously or too high, must there not?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I never found that a problem in what was then the DSS. The arrangement then�we are going back several years�was within the centre of the department there was a group, a unit, whose responsibility it was to both monitor the agency and negotiate with me, the agency, on targets. It was there that I felt there was a lack of capacity or a lack of understanding and therefore a desire to have as many targets as you needed to cover everything that the agency was doing. Those were then presented to politicians who would sign them off. I think politicians, secretaries of state, should be involved ultimately in agreeing those targets but it is very difficult for a secretary of state to say "actually I think we should reduce the number of targets. . .." I will leave it at that. I think one of the problems when you have got 152 targets is not just that it is difficult to focus your people on things that matter, you do lose sight of the things that matter. If you take the old DSS situation, for example, one of the key issues in managing that was the priority between accuracy of payment and speed of payment. There is a debate to be had as to what was the trade-off between speed and accuracy because the faster you made the payments the more likely it was that under an incredibly complicated system they were going to be inaccurate. It is very difficult to have that debate. There was a great drive from the centre of the department to have accuracy times which were ratcheted up every year and speed times that were ratcheted up every year because you just could not have a target that was not better than the one you had last year. It is that kind of situation that causes targets to fall into disrepute in the end, I think, because the people on the ground knew damn well that we could not deliver the income support target in five days and do it to a degree of accuracy in 95 per cent given the system that we had.

79. Targets are begat in this unit in the department, does that unit consist entirely of civil servants or is there any political input, say the minister's special advisor or whatever, in that unit as well?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think in most places there would not be a special advisor involved at that stage. A special advisor might well be involved in looking at the proposal that goes to a minister and might say "this looks as if it is a reduction in performance, that is going to be a bit difficult for you", but not at the early stage of negotiation, no.

80. It is entirely civil servants in the unit?
(Sir Michael Bichard) It depends on the department but normally, yes. If one takes it forward to my experience in the DfEE where I was on the other side, I was negotiating the targets with the Employment Service and I hope, therefore, that we were significantly more sensitive to operational needs there. We were trying to introduce more people from outside the Civil Service, so there were one or two people there who had experience outside, but normally it would be civil servants.

81. I am sorry to pursue you on this but I have not got to the crux of the matter myself, and maybe it is my not very mega brain. Okay, the unit comes forward with a draft set of targets, let us say,�
(Sir Michael Bichard) There is a conversation which will go on and the unit will then set a proposed set of targets for the agency, the agency will say "we cannot possibly do that" or "there are too many of them" or whatever, and there is a negotiation that goes on, then this piece of advice that will go up to the secretary of state, hopefully agreed, but remember that the big agency chief executives report directly to the secretary of state and therefore have the ability to send up a dissenting note if they want.

82. Again, when you were permanent secretary in the Department for Education and Employment, were you in at the very beginning when the unit was formulating the targets or did you come in half way through or at the end? Was there some to-ing and fro-ing?
(Sir Michael Bichard) My recollection is in that department what we tried to do was to have a strategic discussion at the outset with the agency about what were the key target areas and the agency staff and my staff in the department would then talk about the detail and I would get involved at the end in a discussion with the chief executive as to whether we had something which we both felt was stretching but achievable. That would then go up as advice to the secretary of state.

83. I think you were permanent secretary in both the first and the second Comprehensive Spending Reviews. Could you say something about that? I am interested to know how the Comprehensive Spending Review came into being and I am looking at it from one particular department, your department.
(Sir Michael Bichard) How it came into being or why it came into being? I think it came into being because of a desire to produce more stability in the financial process.

84. A three year period rather than a one year period.
(Sir Michael Bichard) A three year period rather than a one year period. To some extent that has been successful. I think it was probably in the second round that there was an attempt to include targets to have an agreement, a Public Service Agreement, explicitly and to publish that and then to monitor it. As I said, I do not disagree with that. I think the Treasury is handing out the money and it ought to be clear with the departments about what the money is being spent on but that ought to come out of a wider business planning process and those targets ought to be about outcomes and they ought to be targets which you can influence the delivery of. Certainly in the first Comprehensive Spending Review a lot of the targets if you looked across government, if you looked at the Treasury's targets as well, were pretty process orientated, they were about doing things rather than achieving things. If you take into account all of those caveats it is a process which I do not disagree with. I do not think the monitoring has been as strenuous as, I was going to say I would have liked to have seen, I probably did not want to see as a permanent secretary, but as I would have expected.

85. So you would agree with the Chancellor when he said in the House in July 1998, obviously the time of the first Comprehensive Spending Review: "The purpose of targets is to ensure more resources are given directly to front line services"? Would you entirely agree with that? Am I perhaps quoting him out of context?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not know, I do not know what the context was.

86. It was the first Comprehensive Spending Review.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do believe that if you are going to devolve more resource and more responsibility to the front line, wherever it is, then the performance of that front line does need to be transparent, you do need to be able to hold it to account. If that is what he meant then I agree with it. I think it is very dangerous in a large system to be devolving resources and responsibility and power to people without being able to measure how effectively they are using it and how successful they are being. If you look at the education system in the 1970s and 1980s I think you have a perfect example there of huge amounts of money being devolved to professionals without any real targets and without any real way of measuring what was happening in the system and it was a long time before we realised that on things like literacy and numeracy the standards had actually gone through the floor. I think targets and measurement are very important as a step towards more devolution, I do agree with that.

Chairman

87. Just before we lose that particular point, I think 152 was the number that you�
(Sir Michael Bichard) I may be wrong by one or two.

88. Let us say 152, just so we get an idea of what you are saying. The argument is that there are too many targets. What would be a reasonable number for an agency?
(Sir Michael Bichard) For the Employment Service we tried to keep it below ten. If you have got 30,000, 40,000, 60,000 staff, how on earth do you communicate 152 targets? In a way what you have to do is to focus in on what you think are the priorities but then you leave yourself vulnerable to being told that you have not given enough emphasis to one of the other targets.

89. If we were talking about a department and not an agency?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think roughly the same. We had a business plan in the DfEE�you can get a copy of it�and again we tried to keep it to ten or a dozen priority targets for the year.

Brian White

90. It has been said that targets are a very useful vehicle for initiating change, but the longer they go on they become less useful, it is the law of diminishing returns. Do you subscribe to that?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not believe that targets as a process lose their impact but I did say that if you do not refresh your targets then you are in danger of disorderly behaviour and people will see them as just routine. It would be a very odd world, would it not, if we had the same targets year on year on year in any event because the pressures upon you and the priorities are different so your targets should be different. I think they do need freshening up from time to time.

91. You say that targets tend to be within departments?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

92. If I could use an example, and it is specialist schools, if there is a proposal from the government, a quite reasonable proposal, to meet government educational targets but the consequence at local level is more increased traffic, which means the DETR does not get its target of reducing car usage, how do you get that cross-departmental target and avoid those unintended consequences?
(Sir Michael Bichard) You have got to identify what are the priorities for cross-departmental working, what are the priority issues, otherwise you just cannot manage this process. There is a lot of strength in what you are saying and that is one of the ways in which you can encourage cross-departmental working, cross-sectoral working, is to have joint targets that go across the boundaries, I think even more if those targets are linked to reward which people can earn by working better with other departments or with local authorities. There are some examples of that but there are not that many. There is a package of things that you could do to encourage that cross-departmental working: joint budgets, joint targets, ministerial champions, all of those things. They happen but I do not think they have gone as far as I would like.

93. So if you are measuring a target and you see unintended consequences happening as a result of work towards that target, what do departments do about rectifying it, particularly if that unintended consequence is somebody else's problem?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Is somebody else's problem?

94. Either the health service or another department.
(Sir Michael Bichard) The responsible thing to do is to revisit the target and if it is a sufficiently significant issue that you have identified to revisit it in year. You need to be careful about that because if you set targets then people expect to work to that target for the period that you have set it. If it was a really significant issue you would need to revisit it in the year, even if the problem is not yours but someone else's in the system, certainly otherwise you must revisit it at the end of the year and you should be discussing that with your partners. That is the theoretical answer, is it not, really. Whether or not that happens sufficiently is for others to decide.

95. It did not happen with you when�
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not think I have got any specific examples where I can say to you that a target was not revisited because it was causing problems for someone else but not for us, so I cannot say that, but human nature being what it is.

96. One of the things that has come up is the number of bodies to measure targets. What do you think of the monitoring process? Are there too many bodies looking at targets at the moment?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not know whether I am as concerned about the number of bodies, although there are a lot, as I am about the bureaucracy that surrounds some of the processes. Their work in terms of standards, regulation, should ultimately be improving the delivery of service. Once you get to the point where it gets in the way of improving that delivery of service and stops people doing their real work then I think we have a problem. In some cases that has been the case. I have a problem with some standards inspectorates who have been more concerned about blame than they have about learning and I think that brings the process into disrepute. I have a slight concern about the way in which government seems to find these inspection organisations a good thing for others but not necessarily a good thing for itself. I look with some amusement at the moment at the way in which everyone is lauding the Comprehensive Performance Assessments which are being used by the Audit Commission in local authorities. I was actually rather impressed with the way in which the Audit Commission had gone about that task and I would love to see the same thing happening in government departments. If it is good for local authorities, why is it not good for government departments?

Chairman

97. CPAs for every government department.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes, published. I was saying when I was in government, just so you do not think I am changing my position, that we needed, and I was then suggesting the NAO should do this, regular reports on the management performance of government departments which were published and which were discussed at inquiries like this. What we get actually are reports on ad hoc issues, we never get a published report on the management capacity of individual departments and their performance; you do on local authorities now.

Brian White

98. One final question which is that targets tend to be about efficiency, about making sure that the departments are actually delivering. If you want to move to public services that have lots of choice that implies that you have inefficiencies in the system. How do you square choice so, for example, all the schools are full, the schools have a choice and not the parents? How do you square inefficiency versus choice?
(Sir Michael Bichard) It is a very interesting point and one I have thought more about recently. You are right, if you are going to have that level of choice in the system then there has got to be some spare capacity in the system, that is how choice works, and therefore you have got to be prepared at the outset to invest in some spare capacity in the system and, therefore, you have got to have that policy strategic debate at the outset. I am not sure I see it as tied closely to the issue of targets, I think it is a major strategic issue.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

99. Why did you leave?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I was not expecting that question this morning.

Chairman: Ian is a military man, he has a direct way with him.

100. I am fascinated because you fought your way and you got in. I am just looking at The Outsider v. the Club. I was wondering why you went in the end? Did you just get sick of the whole thing or did you think the money was not all that or you had got knighted and you should have gone?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Never my great motivator. A range of reasons, I suppose. One was I quite wanted to do something different. I could have gone and done a permanent secretary's job in another department but I had done that for five or six years and frankly I did not want to do the same job just somewhere else. That was an issue. I wanted to move to a completely different environment, which I have been able to do. I think it is a pretty well open secret that I was frustrated at the speed of change. I thought I was beginning to become a caricature of the person who was always moaning about things not moving faster and it seemed to me it was probably time, before that became too much of a caricature, for me to move on and someone else to carry the flag.

101. That is the crux of the matter, that things were not moving fast enough. How do you see the interface between people like yourself being brought in and businessmen? I was reading The Outsider v. the club, the permanent secretaries' club, and only one of them had gone into the World Bank, Rachel Lomax, who had been a career civil servant before that. Do you think that more people should be brought in from outside to try and steer government down to the ethos of business which has targets, has always had targets, budgets, etc., and accepts them for what they are? Is there a way for that connection?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I get slightly worried about the language of just importing private sector business mechanisms into government. I think a lot of what the private sector does, a lot of the mechanisms, are really, really good and therefore what we ought to be doing is justifying them on the basis that they are good systems and good approaches, not that they were done in the private sector. Basically on the main point of your question I do believe, and I have said constantly, that we ought to be bringing into government more people from outside, not just from the private sector but from other parts of the public sector, from the voluntary sector too, that there should be a better flow both ways. I do not think we should not have civil servants who see themselves necessarily forever working in the Civil Service. I happened to have a look at the evidence I gave when I was last here and I think we talked then about the difference between stagnant puddles and fast flowing streams. I am quite keen on fast flowing streams and sometimes I have worried that our government system, Whitehall, is too much like a stagnant puddle.

102. This government uses an enormous amount of management consultants, bringing them in all the time.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think all governments have done that.

103. Fine, but I am just trying to figure out how much they have spent in the last couple of years on this. Do you think that they could be used to try and appraise targets? You had 152 and you said the ideal was about ten or thereabouts. Do you think that they should be appraised from an external source as opposed to an internal one?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think that can be very helpful actually. The extent to which consultants are effective they would say, and I would agree, is very much down to the way in which you specify their task and manage their performance. That is a skill in itself which maybe we have not always got right. In terms of this morning and the evidence, I should say there are many things that the Civil Service does that I am very appreciative of and there are some brilliant people there, so I do not want to give an entirely pessimistic picture.

104. I do not think anybody would suggest that for one minute. What we are trying to tease out is the way the targeting system works in this country and some of the ramifications and problems of it.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think having external people, having an external look, is absolutely right, that is what you need if you are not going to miss some of the big things like accuracy and speed.

105. One of the things you said which intrigued me in The Governance of the Public Sector, which you wrote, was "If the Treasury (and No 10) become too strong and too interventionist, the role of Ministers and their departments is devalued." If that is the case then how do you administer the target because you have got the overall body, the Cabinet Office or whatever, putting pressure on saying "this will be achieved and if it is not we will think about something else"? Do you see it being too interventionist or do you think that the executive is becoming too all controlling, I suppose is the word, and what problems will that bring?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think you need to be constantly asking that question, which is not a way of ducking the question at all. I am not sure that I believe it necessarily is too interventionist. I said last time I think one of the most difficult decisions in public administration is when do you devolve and when do you centralise. As a subset of that one of the most difficult questions is when do you intervene and when do you not. I think if you have got a good business plan with a small set of key targets and you are monitoring those rigorously then you are in a good position to know whether or not they are being delivered and when you should intervene. I am not against intervention. For heaven's sake, look at what we did with local education authorities where the department probably intervened more than at any other time in the history of education. One of the great strengths of introducing the literacy and numeracy targets and strategy was that we had information available at school and local authority level which enabled us to intervene where we thought that was necessary, whereas in the past what had happened was you had the targets, you had a vague sense that they were not being achieved but you did not know where to focus your attention to try and make sure that they were achieved. Where kids' education is concerned, where literacy and numeracy standards are concerned, I think they are important enough issues for central government to have the right to intervene if they feel that a local education authority or a school is just not delivering. You need reliable data.

106. In your Ten Steps to Delivery, number six, you "Review the operation of Public Service Agreements. Every government department needs a decent business plan which provides them with purpose, direction and a focus on priorities. PSAs do not provide this."
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

107. Are you confirming from what you have just said that in fact the whole thing is not being controlled?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I was not involved in a lot of PSAs. My sense is, from what I hear, that it is an improved process. I have not done a review of the targets which form the Public Service Agreements. Really I do not think that I am qualified to comment on that. I was talking about the first two rounds where I think a lot of the targets were not measurable, they were not focused, they were not rigorously monitored and they did not come out with decent business plans.

108. You keep very much involved still in what is going on. What is your best guestimate?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think that is an unfair question. I only have the knowledge now of a lay person and I think it is wrong for me to draw conclusions really.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: Okay. Thank you very much.

Chairman: I think you have been as helpful as you possibly can be on that. We have pressed you too far.

Kevin Brennan

109. You have put your finger on some key issues here regarding targets in the opening statement you have made in the paper you have provided us with. Can I just explore that a little bit with you. You have set out 17 key points you think are required to design a good target. I was interested in what you said. You said the targets should be stretching the achievable. Would you accept the proposition that if all targets were achieved that they would not be stretching enough?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

110. If you accept that point, would you accept that it is inevitable that some targets are not met?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do. I do accept that, yes.

111. Should you not add to your points that we should have a target for how many targets we should expect to meet?
(Sir Michael Bichard) It varies according to circumstances.

112. In a given circumstance should there not be a target for how many of the targets you have said you expect to meet?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think that is an artificial target. When I was running the Employment Service what I would do was agree with the chief executive and he would with his staff a bonus which reflected his performance against targets. In that bonus I would say to him you will get so much if you get 80 per cent of the target.

113. I am making a serious point because you have said in your statement that "Unrealistic targets do not raise performance�they simply demoralise staff".
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

114. You have accepted my proposition that it is inevitable you will fail to reach some of the targets. At the outset we have heard that is an inevitable outcome, therefore, that you will demoralise staff by setting targets which you do not expect them to be able to reach.
(Sir Michael Bichard) No, I do not think that does demoralise staff. I would not have been demoralised if I had achieved 80/90 per cent of my targets actually, I would have been delighted. I do not think that does demoralise the staff.

115. Would that be something you would communicate to your staff? You might not be demoralised but would you communicate to your staff at the outset "Listen we are setting all these targets, limited in number as you say, but we do not realistically expect you to be able to meet them all. If you reach 80 or 90 per cent of them as your manager I will not be demoralised and therefore you as a member of staff should not be demoralised by the fact that you feel you have reached them".
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think it is a question of how you go about managing your staff. The management and the leadership I would give to staff is "We have set these targets. We will do our darnedest to meet all of them. We will not give up on any of them".

116. I do not expect you to meet them all.
(Sir Michael Bichard) No, I would not say that at all because I would like to think we could meet them. My answer to your question is I would not expect them all to be met necessarily but the other side of the coin is if all of them are not met then the way in which management responds to that is really important. I would not go around beating people up because they have missed a couple of targets, maybe partly because of external factors or maybe partly because they just turn out.

117. We know what will happen, do we not? You will not go around beating them but you have said in the final part in your points about targets that the media response to you not meeting them�because you have said that you have told the staff they have to meet all the targets�is they will say you have failed and the people who are charged with reaching those targets have failed.
(Sir Michael Bichard) No, we cannot be driven entirely by the media response. We are in this business to provide the best possible service to the public. I am about trying to find systems which will deliver the best possible service to the public. If we do not have targets, which I have said at the outset have got risks attached to them and are not perfect, I can tell you what happens with a lot of staff and that is they run around like headless chickens trying to understand what the hell they are supposed to be doing and what are the priorities in this business, what do they want us to do. Let me tell you that is very demoralising and that is a lot more demoralising than not achieving a couple of targets when your management is reasonably understanding. I can lack understanding when people are not performing but I think if people have really pulled out all the stops and got as close as they can to performing then that is when one should be supporting and not blaming.

118. I would agree with you entirely that people want to be given the ball and told in what direction to run with it and given the freedom to use it appropriately. Are you not setting them up to fail if you give them a series of targets which you as a manager secretly, because you do not share this with them, know they will not be able to reach and when they stumble and fail as a result of that you say "Well actually do not worry about it, we do not mind it".
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think there are different philosophies and different ways of motivating or not people. My philosophy and my way of motivating is always to be clear about what you are trying to achieve and do your darnedest to achieve it. Sometimes you will fall short both as an individual and as an organisation but I would rather do that than avoid clarity of direction and clarity of focus simply because of the danger that we might miss and we might fail. The public want us to improve the quality of service and get as close as we can to perfection, that is what we should be doing. We should not be driven totally by what the media think and we should not be driven totally by the fact that some staff may find all this a bit difficult. Our job is public service not staff reassurance.

119. Can you give me an example from your experience of a bad target?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think the speed of payment one that I talked about earlier was a bad target because of the impact that it was having on accuracy and on so much else that was happening including customer service which was pretty damaging. That is a serious example.

120. I am very grateful for that. It is difficult to get people to give examples sometimes.
(Sir Michael Bichard) If you want a more flippant example, the example about how quickly you got someone out of a Benefit Office was a bad target. There are two ways in which you can get someone out of a Benefits Office. The staff very quickly realised that if you threw them out they came back and therefore you hit the target twice.

Chairman

121. That is the kind of example we want.
(Sir Michael Bichard) That is not an entirely flippant one.

Kevin Brennan

122. I am very grateful for both examples, both the serious one and the flippant one. Leaving aside the flippant example which I am sure we will utilise later on, the other example you gave as a bad target in terms of your 17 points for designing a good target, which of those did it fail?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I am not sure I can answer that.

123. Not in terms of all of them.
(Sir Michael Bichard) The last point I made there, targets should reflect priorities, they should not fudge difficult decisions. A difficult decision is are we serious about accuracy or are we serious about speed and have we got the right trade off, that is the one.

Mr Hopkins

124. Sir Michael, I have not heard you speak before and I must say I found myself interested in what you were saying. I am one of those people on the left who made a lot of enemies of my former friends by being critical of the teaching profession. In the 1980s you may remember the research done by Sig Prais and Claus Moser which gave horrifying comparisons between our schools and what our children were learning with other countries. We started to address that. The William Tyndale School head teacher said that "if 50 per cent of the children can read by the time they leave my school I will be quite happy with that". He was sacked. We started to realise something horrible was happening in our schools. I have focused on education, I have taught in further education myself and even recently we have had the Moser Report four years ago saying 50 per cent of our population do not understand what 50 per cent means. There is still a problem in the population as a whole but I think we are starting to address it. I think the measurement is absolutely crucial and we have to start measuring and finding out what is happening. The targets you say can sometimes be demoralising. My own feeling was that pressure was put on schools and teachers without telling them precisely what you wanted them to do. You were permanent secretary in the Department of Education in a crucial period. Was there any really serious attempt to come to grips with the fact that teachers had been fed nonsense for years about how to teach. In my view the child centre, progressive centres actually caused mayhem in schools and unfortunately a whole generation of teachers got really demoralised because they felt in a sense they had wasted their time because they had been told nonsense about how to teach. That is changing now. Nobody has faced up to that. We are having literacy and numeracy strategy and that sort of thing and publishing targets but we are not saying something is wrong. Just a final point. A very good friend of mine grew up in Pakistan, he is now a graduate. He said we can all do arithmetic in Pakistan because we are taught tables by standing up and chanting in unison. Now if I said that to a teacher in Britain they would have passed out, I think, at the thought it was so horrifying, so connective. Do we not need to address the methods of achieving the targets not just put the targets in place?
(Sir Michael Bichard) There are a huge number of issues there. I think we do; of course, we do. Targets are just a way of measuring not a way of doing. I think probably I disagree with you that we did not. I think the literacy and the numeracy strategy which were about more than just the literacy and numeracy hours were probably the first real attempt to say how things were going to be done in the classroom certainly since the war. I think they have been pretty successful, I suppose I would say that. I think the reason they were successful was they were based on a lot of evidence which was drawn up from around the world on what was working. The literacy and numeracy strategy was coupled with increasing evidence from the inspection process about what worked in schools. I think it is quite difficult for schools now to say that they do not know what it is that makes for a successful school. I think we know a lot more now than we have ever done about what makes for a successful school and how they should behave and I think that is all to the good. This is going a bit beyond this particular inquiry but I think you pick up an issue which is related to targets and tables and which we have not talked much about and that is risk and creativity. One of the things you can criticise targets and prescription tables for is that they make people less likely to be creative. I think that is something one should be concerned about. As I said you should not produce targets which are so prescriptive down to the last detail that people lose their creativity. Teaching in a classroom requires some creativity. Now I think the best teachers have been able to use their creativity within this new framework of targets and strategies and I know that is not agreed by everyone but I think they have. You do need to be worried about that. Finally, I have just come back from Hong Kong where I was speaking at a seminar at the weekend on creative cities. Of course go to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan actually and what they look with envy at the English system for is creativity. They are concerned that they have a lot of people who are very good on standards but as they move from a manufacturing economy to a design creative base economy they do not have enough people who have the creative skills and who know how to innovate. We just need to be careful that we do not become so managerial and do not produce targets which are so prescriptive and detailed that we squeeze out risk and creativity. Good managers can manage risk as well as they can manage targets.

125. Can I just pursue this. My next question was going to be about international comparisons. One can take the extremes of the Far East and their problems of rigidity and lack of imagination and creativity, we have new ideas and they develop them and so on but there are other examples on the Continent of Europe where they are being much more successful. I have been to Norway recently and they are very sensitive to all the problems we have had but they are way ahead of us I think in solving them. Have we looked very carefully at other systems rather than looking at just the extremes of the Far East?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I thought we were getting better at that. I think there was a lot more effort to find out what was happening in detail and to try and pick up the good practice.

126. One more brief question. One of the problems I believe�I do not know if you would agree�is that in Britain we try to get too much out for too little input. Resources in education by comparison with other countries are much lower. The fact is in Denmark class sizes are about half what ours are. In Switzerland I understand teachers are paid the same as their GPs, I am not saying we should go to those extremes. Do we not need to think really about putting a lot more resources into achieving our targets?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think in education we were trying to do that. We did try to find ways of increasing the salaries of teachers and head teachers. I think more generally the Government has put a lot of money into public services. My great concern is whether that money will lead to improved services. The history over the last 50 or 60 years is that it does not always happen like that and that is a real worry. The point about targets surely in particular is that you are never going to have enough money. I used to say to my staff "It is very unlikely I will ever get up in front of you and you say `Fair cop, guv, we have got far too much money we do not know what to do with it'." It is always going to be "We have not got enough money". You have to use that resource as well as you possibly can. I do not want to bore you about this but targets are a way of making sure that people will focus their energy on the things which you think generally are the priorities otherwise everyone has got their own view about what they should be doing. Every teacher, every doctor, every one in every public service has got their own personal priorities. They have got good intentions. They are committed dedicated people and without some focus they will go off in all sorts of different directions and a lot of money is wasted.

Chairman

127. Can I just follow up one aspect of what Kelvin has been asking. You mentioned literacy and numeracy, this is always cited as the great shining success story of central intervention, whatever else you might think about it. I wonder how it sits with your general analysis because it was not just an outcome, it was very much a process intervention.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I wanted to pick that point up about five minutes ago and I forgot it, you are absolutely right. It was a process intervention. I should have said right at the beginning, this is not a cop out, I think there are some occasions�and they are very few in my view�when you have to take the decision to intervene in the process as well as the outcome. You only take that if you feel the problems are serious enough to merit it and there is not sufficient consensus around the process that people are confused. You do not do that very often because, one, for the Government it is a very risky strategy because it is your head on the line if it does not work and, two, it does run the risk of people feeling they are no longer in control of their own destiny and their own creativity and that can be very demoralising at the time. The evidence I was giving last year to other Select Committees was I think Government had to take a view and has to constantly take a view as to whether it continues with that degree of intervention. So be very careful about it. We thought and the Secretary of State felt that things had got to a pass where we just had to intervene on the process as well as the outcome.

Annette Brooke

128. I would like to just backtrack a little bit and things in terms of targets might be concealing as much as they are revealing. I would like to quote from a local example but I do not expect you to speak on that. Dorset Ambulance Trust was very highly favoured a year ago. It had reached all its targets, it was within budget. It had Investors In People two years running. It has a charter mark. The CHI comes in and it is a totally different story now. You mentioned the need for an auditing process but could you just expand on that and what else one needs to have some confidence that the targets are giving us the right story?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not think there is a magic wand here. What I am suggesting is a combination of internal processes and external processes. I am suggesting the external processes should not be so bureaucratic as to get in the way of the service but you do need them. Whether that is external audit or whether it is an inspection process I think you do need them. The integrity of your performance as well as the level of your performance is going to depend primarily on what is going on within the organisation. That is why things like self-assessment are so much more important in my view than external audit though I still think you need in a monopolistic situation someone from outside having a look at how you are managing and what targets you are setting and whether the information is independent that you are basing your conclusion on, whether it is reliable and whether you need to have another look at the target. All of that I think is necessary. I do not know the Dorset Ambulance Trust case at all.

129. No, I did not want to dwell on that in particular but you had a situation where literally it had to wait for that outside body because nothing would get revealed from within despite the internal problems which were being concealed and not handled by the Trust.
(Sir Michael Bichard) That is a worry. When that happens it is a worry. I have seen it happen once or twice. If you go through a process of IIP, you get charter marks and you have a self-assessment system and it is still not showing that level of performance failure, I do not think it happens that often but I think it is very worrying. It makes me worry with something like IIP, which I was a great believer in and sponsored for a long time, whether the assessment system there was sufficiently good.

130. It is just, I suppose, thinking about Ofsted being over the top to start with. One hesitates to say that there should be regular inspections on all sorts of bodies but having had this situation locally it would not have come out without the CHI going in. There seems to be a case for having annual check-ups on such bodies.
(Sir Michael Bichard) It needs to be annual and certainly I think if it is too bureaucratic every year then you have got a problem. Surely what we should be trying to do is to have enough indicators in the public domain about an organisation to be able to draw some reasonably reliable conclusions about whether or not this is a high performing organisation or an organisation in difficulty. What we have begun to do now with schools is to focus the Ofsted inspection on the schools which from the evidence we have appear to be in difficulty and not spend as much time on the schools which from the evidence we have appear to be performing well. Sometimes we will get it wrong, sometimes the evidence will be manipulated or it will not throw up a cause of particular concern but I think that is the exception rather than the rule.

131. In fact possibly you would favour something like Ofsted which went in quite heavily to start with and then stood back?
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes. I have always supported Ofsted and I have always been in favour of Ofsted. In a monopolistic situation then you need something like Ofsted. My concern at the time and my complaint now is that it was too focused for too long on blame. An inspection system is as much about ensuring that a good practice gets around the system. For a good practice to get around the system you need to develop some ownership for it. You cannot just tell people when they get things wrong, you cannot just tell a profession when they get it wrong, you have got to tell them also when they get it right and help them to ensure that good practice is spread around the system. That was my complaint about Ofsted. I think in the more recent times that has improved significantly under the new head.

132. I think there has been interest on the culture of inspection. Finally, I posed this question a fortnight ago, particularly on the health side. Instinctively I favour the setting of more local targets. How do we marry that with the fact the public do not like the postcode lottery?
(Sir Michael Bichard) The postcode lottery in what sense?

133. If I live in a certain place I might get my hip operation or whatever much quicker than somewhere else and yet it might be a local priority in certain areas, that sort of thing?
(Sir Michael Bichard) This is a difficult issue, I think. It is a wider issue than just about targets, it is an issue about how much the public are prepared to accept different levels of service around the country which is an inevitable consequence of a real devolution. My view is that the media are increasingly unsympathetic to different levels of service. We had a national media and they expect national standards of service. My belief is you get a lot out of devolution, you cannot run systems entirely from the centre. You and I are probably identifying a problem to which there is no easy answer. I would defend, however, the need for local targets so that local people can hold their performance unit to account. They are able to draw comparisons, of course, between what is happening in their area and what is happening elsewhere. That may well be uncomfortable sometimes but sometimes they may have a point. Sometimes they may be saying "Look at that authority which seems to have achieved a different level of priorities as expressed in its targets and we think that they are right. We would rather you did give a higher priority to this target and a lower priority to that target". I think that is an entirely healthy process. It can be uncomfortable and I think the delivery unit needs to be pretty mature and robust to be involved in it. What happens without it, people have no idea, do they, about what is happening in their hospitals, that does not seem to me to be acceptable either. The hospital itself has no real idea, I have said on two or three occasions, where to focus its energy and its limited resources. That is a debate which has to happen and has to end up with clearer priorities articulated in the form of clearer targets. You do need local ties. We could not have done what we did�it was not an unalloyed success but I think literacy and numeracy has been more of a success than a failure�unless we had targets at national level, local education authority level and school level because it is at the school level that you need the ownership and the target at the school level has got to be more about how do we deliver improvement on what we are doing currently. They need to know what it is that they need to do in that school as their contribution to the national target being met. If you cannot tell them that they are not interested because they have not got any influence over it. I remember part of the PSA discussion I had with the Treasury was they wanted to set me a target for controlling inflation. There is a limited amount I can do to control the level of inflation. I was responsible for the Employment Service but even so it is not a target which is designed for me to have ownership. You must have ownership at the local level.

134. Coming back to the previous point, achieving the target in terms of literacy and numeracy for some schools meant the loss of music.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Of course in my new role I could not possibly condone that or accept it. We could have a long debate about whether that was necessary.

Chairman

135. We have just got a very few minutes so if I could sweep up on a couple of things and then ask you if there is anything we have not asked you which you would like to tell us, particularly on the recommendation side. I think we are trying to extract what we can out of you. You know the old adage about you do not make a pig fatter by constantly measuring it which you put alongside the adage which says you do not know if the pig is getting fatter unless you do constantly measure. You introduced helpfully the notion of performance indicators as well as targets, is the argument that you cannot have too much measurement in Government? We have now a great industry producing measurement in Government and volumes of performance indicators produced, there is a whole enterprise doing it. Should we welcome that simply as the more measurement the better because that just tells us more things or should we worry about that too?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think I should step back at this point and say all the things I have been saying suggest that probably we have got too many targets and too much measurement at the moment. I have been defending the concept of targets because I think they are really important but I think you can have too much of it and you can measure things too often and I think we have probably got to the point where that is the situation and then they lose their impact and become an obstacle rather than a facilitator. That is probably the point I need to get across.

136. Let me take you back to what I started with which was the league table, this kind of test case for all kinds of things. Are we clear what these things are for? Are they to shame people? Are they to produce peer pressure? Are they to trigger resources either more or less? Are they to enable people to choose but of course, as has been said, that is often not possible? Do we know what these things are for?
(Sir Michael Bichard) I think they are for a number of those. I think that is their strength actually. Whatever teachers say, whatever head teachers say, they look at those tables and they know the schools in their area or in similar areas which have similar intakes and they know whether or not they are performing well and frankly so do the governors. I am a governor now of a college and we know where we should be and whether or not our performance has improved against our peers. I think they do impose some peer pressure but they do enable also parents to ask questions. I think it is very difficult for some parents to get behind the facade which is put up by a school when you are deciding whether or not you want your child to go there. Obviously the school is telling you all of the good things and I think it is useful to have some information which enables you to challenge that a bit and to ask why in comparison to other schools or why in this particular area you do not seem to be doing well. I think frankly a head or any manager in any public service who has not got the courage to answer those questions is a pretty weak minded individual. People who are running public services have got huge amounts of power and huge amounts of information. This is just a way of encouraging them to share some of that with the clients and I do not think that is unreasonable.

137. Just a couple more final things. You tended to talk about targets being annual things as part of business plans but then you said they needed to be constantly refreshed and reviewed.
(Sir Michael Bichard) Yes.

138. I wonder just whether an annual cycle actually does capture strategic business planning and whether that cycle is right. Also if there is constant review and refreshment going on how on earth can you get any serious measurement of this because it is a moving target.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I do not think you should change everything every year, that is stupid. I think you need constantly to be keeping an eye on the way in which you formulate the targets. You need to be clear that your targets are still reflecting your priorities. If priorities are changing your targets ought to change as well probably. I do not think you should be doing that constantly, changing it constantly because people do lose sight of where on earthy they are. Of course you are right in some areas, not geographical but functional areas, you should have three, four, five year targets. The literacy and numeracy target was over an extended period but it was then broken down so people were clear what they had to do year on year in their particular unit to deliver what we wanted over a five year period. We missed it at the end of the day, not by that much but we did miss it. Yes, there are some areas where you ought to have strategic five year targets. As I said people are going to be quite reluctant to do that now.

139. You implied this earlier on but when we reach a point where a Secretary of State has to resign, at least in part, because she is attacked for not meeting a target that she announced or had been announced by the Department some years previously and she is hounded by the media for the same reason, do we not just consume ourselves coming backwards?
(Sir Michael Bichard) It is a totally bizarre situation where we have the world beating a path to our door to find out how we have achieved what we have achieved on literacy and numeracy over the last five years and we regard it as a failure.

140. Unless you have got any parting shots for us?
(Sir Michael Bichard) No.

141. You have been extremely helpful and we shall draw shamelessly on what you have said to us. We are very grateful. I cannot promise that we shall not invite you to come again.
(Sir Michael Bichard) I enjoyed it as ever. Thank you very much.

[top]

MR ROGER THAYNE OBE, COUNCILLOR SIR JEREMY BEECHAM, MR MATTHEW WARBURTON AND MR MIKE STONE

THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2002

Chairman

142. Could I call the Committee to order and welcome our witnesses here to the inquiry we are doing on targets and league tables and measurement inside government. We are delighted to welcome Sir Jeremy Beecham, Chairman of the Local Government Association; Mike Stone, Chief Executive of the Patients Association, and Roger Thayne, Chief Executive of the Staffordshire Ambulance Service. We ought just to spend a couple of minutes, though, because there is some interest in your appearance here, Sir Jeremy, on just clearing away where we are at in terms of the fire dispute, if you do not mind. Can you bring us news from the front line? Are we on the eve of a settlement?

(Sir Jeremy Beecham) That is a question that really ought to be directed at the general secretary of the FBU. I hope we are on the eve of a settlement and that the strike will be called off but that depends on the response to the offer which the employers' side are considering this morning before putting it formally to the FBU. To coin a phrase from today's agenda, our target is a service which is better able to prevent risk to life and limb by more flexible use of skills within the service and, for that matter, to respond more effectively to a range of emergencies in collaboration with other emergency services such as, indeed, the ambulance service. It is in that context that the offer that the employers' side are discussing this morning which they, I assume, will put forward shortly, will very firmly link modernisation and change to pay so that pay increases will take place against validated, delivered change in the service which is an aspiration which has long been held but, alas, not significantly been advanced over recent years.

143. Some say that the fire service is the last great unreformed public service. Is that right?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Well, I have not examined all the others, but certainly it does need reform.

144. Does the proposal that has come from the employers involve some government money?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Our view is that it is unlikely that the modernisation we are seeking will of itself generate all that may be required to finance the new structure in cash terms. We would certainly, however, be inviting government to consider the cost benefit implications of some of the changes. For example, one of the things we are pursuing is the first use of life-saving equipment, say, defibrillators, for cardiac victims at the scene of an accident. That will not necessarily produce a cash saving but it will save lives and there will be other areas, particularly on the preventative side, where a cost benefit analysis would show potentially significant savings across society as a whole�or, to take an example, the joint use of control means, if that progresses, would save not only money for the fire service but also for the ambulance service potentially and the police. So we would be looking for some recognition of that but we recognise that there will be significant cash savings that will accrue as well from some of the changes we have advocated, and that has been adopted or extended.

145. This idea of using the Audit Commission to validate any settlement would be quite new, would it not?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Well, it would be new but we do think it is essential, given the record of really the last couple of decades of talks taking place around modernisation but nothing much being achieved, for the public and the government to be quite satisfied that change is actually delivered. The Audit Commission, of course, reported at length on the fire service in 1995 identifying the fact that although, generally speaking, there was a good service, nevertheless it found a number of areas which needed improvement and where efficiency could be improved, so they have a track record of interest and involvement in the service. They are not uncritical of either local government or government from time, and they come to it clearly with that sort of stature, and we think that they are the right body to validate the improvements that we are seeking upon which pay increases would be conditional.

146. Are they happy to have that role?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) My understanding is they would be prepared to undertake that role.

  147. Could I bring Roger in? Roger is my ambulance chief and, as people will ask you shortly, you sorted out the ambulance service in Staffordshire and you have made it the best ambulance service in the country by radical re-organisation. What on earth would you do if you got your hands on the fire service?
  (Sir Jeremy Beecham) Retire!
  (Mr Thayne) We have got tremendous respect for the fire service and I think we have to understand that fire and ambulance are two distinct things and not try to justify a large fire service by taking over some of the ambulance work. Around the world you can see that being done, you can see it in America, etc, and there is a belief that it saves more lives but there is no proof that it does. So that is the first thing. Secondly, I think that we have to adjust the service that we provide to that that the public needs, not that we think they need but that the public actually need, so we have to be there at the time and the days and the location�that is all that we have done. Just by doing that, you do not need extra funding. You can pay staff more money, which we have done; you can save more lives; and you can satisfy the public; and you know from your own experience that the people at the front line are absolutely superb, whether they are firemen, policemen or ambulance people. A lot of them are working in very bad systems which prevents them from being efficient, so all we did in Staffordshire is improve the system.

Mr Prentice

148. Sir Jeremy, on the fire service, there must be a lot of people out there who are perplexed that working practices agreed in the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee should remain completely unchanged in the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee. Who is responsible for allowing this situation to continue? Is it local government or is it central government?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I think both, to a degree. Certainly until the Home Office ceased to be responsible for this in 1997 they were notably reluctant to address these issues or indeed encourage local government to address these issues and for that matter, clearly, as we can see from the prevalence of 50 year old Green Goddesses took no steps to provide a reserve of more modern appliances for which trained military personnel might be available in the event of things unfortunately going wrong, as they have done recently. So I think there was a lack of will there and, as far as local government was concerned, although we have tried to raise these issues, there was no leverage because the pay formula was an automatic one which suited the union very well until last year or so, therefore there was no leverage in the context of annual negotiations which could be applied. Having said that, I would not deny that maybe a more vigorous stance might have produced an effect, although one could not necessarily guarantee that.

149. Can I just bring us forward to 1995? The Chairman mentioned the Audit Commission report and I have had a look at that and it recommended review of fire station crewing, matching control room staffing more closely with workload, sharing control room facilities with other brigades�all the stuff that is on the agenda now and that was in 1995, seven years ago. What happened to that Audit Commission report? Was it discussed?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) It was discussed and, frankly, kicked into the long grass by the FBU.

150. So the FBU always had an arm lock on everything?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) That is right and because we had no way of prizing that loose in terms of making pay conditional upon change, which is now the situation that we are in, there was no way of advancing the argument. There are other areas which government itself could have addressed. There is an archaic disciplinary procedure which gives an individual fire fighter the right of appeal in a disciplinary matter up to the then Home Secretary, now presumably Deputy Prime Minister, under military style regulations which the government is responsible for and could change, if it chose to do so.

151. Lastly, the cost of the fire service to local government. When can fire fighters retire from the service?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) They have a generous pension scheme. They can retire after thirty years' service. The optimum time I understand is 26 and two thirds years, upon which they can retire with a full pension.

152. Would that be at the age of 50?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes. Indeed, I recently responded to an article in my local newspaper by a fire fighter who described himself as retiring "next year, now aged 49", and pointing out that possibly this attractive pension scheme may be one of the reasons why there are 40 applicants for every vacancy.

153. So on this question of retiring at 49 or 50 on a full pension, did alarm bells not ring in local government when you or your people discovered that 70 per cent of fire fighters retired early on grounds of ill health?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes, but this is not by any means confined to the fire service. You will find similar levels apply to the police service�I cannot speak for the ambulance service. The police service also has had higher levels of retirement on ill health grounds at a relatively early age. The question of the pension costs of police and fire services has loomed very large in our argument with governments of both colours over many years, because it is now absorbing an increasing proportion of fire authority budgets as it is an unfunded scheme. This has been one of the problems and now I think something like 30 per cent of the fire fighters' budget is going straight out in pensions which are pay as you go rather than having been funded.

154. 30 per cent?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes.

Chairman

155. As a reader of your expressions, Roger, I can see your face doing various things! Just tell us what you are thinking.
(Mr Thayne) We have no early retirement. Ambulance paramedics and technicians go on to 65. Traditionally not many reach that age and they have a very short life span after retirement. What we have done in Staffordshire is introduce a retirement employed scheme where they can retire after thirty years and come back and work part time. We now have the oldest average age ambulance service in the country, and what we find is that those experienced individuals contribute greatly both to the training of our new staff and to the treatment of patients. In terms of pay, a senior paramedic is paid less than a junior fireman, and the chief executive of the ambulance service certainly in Staffordshire is paid about 50 per cent less than the chief fire officer. Our budgets are about a third.

Mr Trend

156. Going back to the current dispute, because others were speculating about a possible gap which has opened up which might need to be bridged between an immediate increase in costs due to increased salaries for the firemen, and the possible benefits which might come from savings somewhere down the road. It has been suggested there will be a gap that needs to be bridged. Is it your view that the government will have to put in extra money to bridge it?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) We would certainly be looking to the government to help us bridge that gap and we would expect a reasonably sympathetic response. Some indications from the Deputy Prime Minister publicly were that that might be the case. It would make sense because it is, in effect, investing to save which is certainly a legitimate conventional approach for government, and we also think that our proposals are consistent with the Bain approach which envisages, quite apart from the immediate 11.3 per cent, a new formula being applied and it is the application of the new formula from next November which, if that is agreed this morning by the employers' side, will lead to the overall package.

Chairman

157. Let us move into more general territory now, if we may, which is why we brought you here in the first place. What I would quite like to do, because we hope to be done by half past eleven for a variety of reasons, is to ask Roger Thayne this to start with: Roger, the reason we invited you is that you are an example of a successfully modernised bit of the public service, and what I would like to ask you is what role did targets play, particularly targets from the centre, in bringing that around, or was it a question simply of domestic management?
(Mr Thayne) If we go back to when we started in 1992, we became an independent NHS trust and we only had one target which was to balance our books at the end of the year. Obviously that had an implication but what we had to do very early on is turn the pyramid around. If I can explain that, a typical public service is where everybody is looking up, so the service is looking up to its managers, the managers to the chief executive, the chief executive to the next level, and of course you are there to look after the public and the important focus is between members of the public who get that service and the staff who provide it, so we had to turn that pyramid completely round so that we were looking as the top management at what our managers were doing and they were looking at what staff were doing in order to provide the service that the patients wanted. We also had to tackle the sort of public service mantra that we could not do it because we had not got the money, and if it was not money it was trade unions and staff, and if it was not that it was the public making unnecessary demands on us�in our case there was too much traffic. We never came to the real reason which is that we had bad managers, and the management was poor. It was not that the people were poor�there was no system. So there was this view that you just could not work out where the next emergency was going to come from or when that was going to come. When you looked at it, it was everybody wanted to work a 9-5 Monday to Friday day and, if you could not do that, they wanted to work a reasonable shift pattern so you could sleep at night, etc. Nobody was talking to the public and nobody was listening to the public and seeing what they wanted, and what we found in the ambulance service was that was quite simple: what they wanted when they rang for an ambulance was to get one as quickly as possible, and for people to be polite and caring and take them to hospital. That was not too difficult to achieve and by talking to the staff we began to see where the problems were. I had a deputation very early on from senior ambulance officers who complained that I had been going into ambulance stations and talking to staff, and they said, "You might have done that in the army but we do not do that in the ambulance service", and that they were a bunch of liars and they told me all sorts of stories. What I managed to get across to them is that within six months I would probably know more about the service than they did, and that the staff did know, and we saved an awful lot of money by engaging the staff and engaging the public. It is not really rocket science in what we did. As the service improves, the standing of the paramedic and the staff you employ improves. What is critical to them is not that they are meeting government targets but that they are feeling they can provide the service that they are paid to do, so, for instance, the more people they get back from cardiac arrest�and we lead just about the world on doing that in Staffordshire; you are 15 times more likely to survive in Staffordshire than if you had a cardiac arrest here today or anywhere in London�that really does empower the staff and get them to accept the changes. So by turning that pyramid round, that has allowed those improvements and has met public satisfaction. I have to say it has got me in a lot of hot water�

158. That is why you are here, but what I am getting at is we are trying to get the model of public service reform here. You did not stick around waiting for the centre to send you a whole list of targets for you to reform your service. You came in and decided this service needed reforming and got on and did it. Are you recommending that as a universal model or do you think we do need a centre to come and sort out bits you cannot sort out?
(Mr Thayne) That is a universal model. It is the way I was trained by the armed forces which is to listen to soldiers, to look after them and to operate a system that allows us to do our job, and I think the British armed forces demonstrate time and time again that that system works. That is all I did. I did not know any other system and, therefore, what I am saying is that public service is full of very dedicated people, particularly those dealing with the public, working in very awful systems and you are not going to change that by targets�you are going to change that by culture and changing the culture of management to improve those systems.

159. Just one more point: I know also you have some fairly robust views on how the target and performance measurement regime has been working in the ambulance service latterly, not least I think you think that it is being fiddled; that some of the measures being reported cannot possibly be true. Could you tell us something about how that works?
(Mr Thayne) Yes. Ambulance services are under tremendous pressure to meet the 8 minute target. The good Lord gave us 8 minutes when we stop breathing or our heart stops to be resuscitated. After that you have no chance. The NHS plan sets a target of achieving a 75 per cent response in 8 minutes to all life threatening emergencies in order to get those survivors. It does not measure how many people survive so it allows a degree of movement in terms of response times, and the way that this is calculated gives individual ambulance services a chance to decide when the clock starts, so it might start some three or four minutes after you make the call and still be within the rules. It also gives you an opportunity to decide whether an emergency is life threatening or not so in most of the country, if you are having chest pains and possibly a heart attack, it is not life threatening�it certainly is in Staffordshire. In some services the percentage of life threatening emergencies is as low as 9 per cent and in Staffordshire it is 50 per cent, so what we are saying there is that pressure from the government to hit a particular target is resulting in people perhaps using all the leeway they have to reach that. Of course, if you were measuring the target properly, that is how many people survived, you would not have a problem.

160. So they are genuine outcome targets and not processed targets?
(Mr Thayne) Yes. It has to be outcomes. When you or I or anybody else accesses the NHS all we are interested in is outcomes. However, we do not measure the outcomes in the NHS.

Chairman: That is most interesting, as well as establishing that if you want to avoid a cardiac arrest you had better live in Staffordshire by a wide margin. We have our own military man, Ian.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

161. Do not work in London, Tony, I think is the answer to that! Coming to Jeremy, looking at your briefing paper, how many targets do you think the government should set that can be achieved in a year? You said there is a reduction from 160 to 130. How many targets would you think? You were head of Newcastle Civic council for a long time and you have a background as a solicitor. What is a reasonable figure?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I would not like to pluck a figure out of thin air.

162. Have a think about it?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I think we have to start with principles, namely that you have to look at outcomes; you have to have targets that are meaningful and that are understandable�both to those delivering the service and to those receiving the service or who are accountable to those receiving the service�you have to avoid ticking boxes and bureaucracy. I think all I can say is that 140 is far too many. We have adopted an approach with government of agreeing seven shared priorities over a range of public services, many of which are interconnected. We would like to see targets that measure outcomes concentrating on those areas and not others. For example, library services, for perhaps understandable reasons, are very keen to establish targets for the number of books lent per thousand inhabitants. Well, this may be desirable but it is not of as high a priority as, for example, ensuring that children at risk are allocated to a social worker within a proper time and that they remain safe, so it is a question of identifying the priority areas for targets and making sure that targets are reasonable. I am a member the NHS modernisation board, so if I may I will stray slightly in the direction of my two colleagues here: one of the targets in the NHS is for people to be referred to a specialist and be seen in the case of suspected cancer within a fortnight, which is fine, but there is not as yet much follow through in terms of treatment following that initial investigation, so that is a starting point but is not particularly helpful, so they have to be related to the overriding priorities and they have to mean something in terms of service and outcome. Beyond that, I would say that that it really ought to be agreed rather than laid down between the partners, it might be the NHS or local government with central government. There is I think a case for targets and benchmarking because part of the exercise must be to raise the expectations of those responsible in government, central and local, about what is achievable and amongst the public who need the service, and so benchmarking and targets have a place but not at the expense of service delivery.

163. Reading through your brief, you say that the government must avoid simply "managing to targets" and keep "in view the ultimate objectives the targets are intended to deliver". As the Local Government Association, are you trying to pressurise government to come up with more realistic targets? You were comparing the consultant situation but are you saying, "Come on, you really have to sit down and think about this a bit harder", because all you are doing is putting a reasonable level of bureaucracy on to people throughout public services, from Newcastle city council to the Health Service. Are you becoming quite vocal in this?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes. We have been pressing government to simplify the expensive superstructure inspection and regulation of which this is part because, as the Audit Commission itself has recently reported, that process is somewhat demoralising as well as being very time-consuming of staff, and in particular the way some of the information is then used in the form of league tables can be very misleading and also demoralising and demotivating without meaning much to the people outside. Frankly the only league table that matters to my constituency is the one in which Newcastle United feature but that is not to say that we should not be helping them form a view about the performance of my authority�or, indeed, any local authority�in relation to key services. But simply this counting as the top of the league does not mean anything very much.

164. Mr Stone, going on from that, your conference in Brussels where you were seen to do rather well, things like league tables are very important to you in what you do within the patients' charter. How do you see things like league tables and targets within that narrow band?
(Mr Stone) I think they are very important. We are not saying for one moment that they are not. They are very helpful as management tools, for example, but they have to be targets that are meaningful, that the public can understand, rather than just coming out with a hospital league table and saying, "This particular hospital is at the top". The public want to know why. What we also have to say, though, is that we do not want to see the NHS, particularly in terms of our area, caught up in this overwhelming bureaucracy. There needs to be proper measurement, meaningful measurement, but at the same time the doctors, the nurses and the people in the frontline still have to have time to see the patients. The patients are the very reason for the NHS, and that is key. Without a doubt the public becomes slightly confused by the targets and by the league tables, and, as was pointed out in the survey on Radio 4 last month on the targets that are set for many NHS managers, with 12 per cent of those people questioned, senior NHS managers admitted to having to massage the figures to meet the targets set by government and that for the public to hear is very worrying.

165. You talk about waiting lists, and we have seen waiting lists and seen cancer being pushed forward�but surely this is all totally unrealistic. My NHS hospital in Somerset did not necessarily have a cancer specialist but they do now because they are having to get it. Has the whole thing got out of sync?
(Mr Stone) If we can look at the wide picture and then go into that in more detail, it is very interesting that for the last three years government has come up with waiting lists and about how many people are on a waiting lists. The public do not care about waiting lists; what they care about is waiting times. How they as individuals are going to have to wait in their local hospitals�that is the key. I hope it is something to do with the fact that we wrote fairly strongly on this line in the media but the government are now looking at waiting times and measuring them which is very important to individual patients. In terms of looking at individual hospitals and cancer specialists, etc, what the public want at the end of the day, whether they live in Somerset or Newcastle, is to know that their local hospital will give them the treatment they need, and one of the keys is, it is all very well saying that if you have cancer you will be seen within two weeks but let us look at the follow-up treatment. That is where the real targets have to be looked at. It is all very well to say that within A&E departments you will not wait longer than such and such, but it is not standardised across the country in terms of how that measurement is taken.

166. Can you standardise it?
(Mr Stone) I think we can.

167. How?
(Mr Stone) I think, firstly, you have to look across the country and look at the variability in terms of the worst performing hospitals and the best. We are meant to live in a country with a National Health Service which, by its very name, implies a national high standard of care across the country. We know that is not happening. We only have to listen to Roger in terms of the ambulance services and the variability around the country that shows in the ambulance services, the response times which are not the same, in the A&E departments in hospitals�the waiting times can vary hugely throughout the country. In terms of standardisation, I am not the person to ask. What I am saying is it should be down to my colleagues in the NHS.

168. Your response time in Newcastle compared with the response time in Somerset is going to be different�Roger shakes his head!
(Mr Thayne) The patients are not different, so if there is a clinical need to be there in four minutes then it does not matter where you are, and there are ways of doing that. For instance, the highest village in England is in Staffordshire, a place called Flash, and as we told the Prime Minister when he visited, you get defibrillated quicker in Flash than you would in 10 Downing Street, and at lower cost.

169. How do you do that? Do you place ambulances?
(Mr Thayne) You go to Flash and you tell the people you cannot get there in the time; they understand it because they live miles from anywhere; and you help them provide their own ambulance service. Pretty simple.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: All right.

Chairman

170. I would have thought you would have got that as a military man, Ian!
(Mr Stone) Just finishing on that point, what we have to say in terms of us as the Patients Association, looking at patients, we have to ask why services are different, and it is up to managers and providers to see that the service reaches that same high standard that we as patients expect.

Kevin Brennan

171. Roger, do you think it is important that employees and managers know exactly what an organisation's targets are?
(Mr Thayne) Yes. The targets are pretty simple. You do not need to know what has been set above them to know what demand is set by the public. I think one of the problems we find on the NHS is that most performance is linked to morale, and if you are there treating patients and you do not believe you have the wherewithal or the time, or you are not treating them by clinical priority, and if you are not allowed to do that your morale goes and your ability to perform then drops, so you have to make sure as an organisation that you keep the morale up and that people feel they can provide that service�and they all know that. Every doctor, nurse, paramedic, fireman, knows what they have to do. There is no problem there. Basically, if you are meeting public's wishes, then you should meet the targets. If you do not�well, the targets are wrong and you should not have them.

172. The reason I ask is you have explained in a very simple, straightforward and impressive way what you have done, yet you say in your submission that you have set yourself 96 targets. Could you name them?
(Mr Thayne) We call them performance indicators and nobody sits there collecting them�they are extracted fairly automatically from our IT systems. For instance, if, during this meeting here, we get a successful resuscitation my pager will go off. You will not hear it but it will tell me, and nobody has had to physically do that; it is set up so that when that happens a lot of people are informed. Before we improved the IT we had lots of people collecting the information which was of very little value and went nowhere, so just like the speedometer on your car you keep an eye on it to make sure you know where you are, and managers need to concentrate in those areas that need attention�not those that do not�so we monitor that very carefully. For instance, I know where every ambulance is and if you come to my office you can see that and if you come to my home you can see that, and we have a very rapid system of putting on more resources should we need it, and that can be very important.

173. But there is an important distinction here because you have said in your submission that you have set yourselves 96 targets but actually what you are talking about when you say you have done that is that it is not 96 things that you expect your staff to have in their mind and be aiming to meet�
(Mr Thayne) Not at all.

174. You are just saying, "As managers we monitor these aspects of our operation as an outward sign of inward grace, if you like, as a way of telling whether or not we are doing our job properly but we do not expect our staff to be worried"?
(Mr Thayne) We set ourselves one target which is for them to remember that every patient is somebody's mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband, wife.

175. That is the target?
(Mr Thayne) Yes, and you do not need to say anything more than that.

176. Because we have taken a fair amount of evidence in this and I would be interested in the views of the other witnesses as well about this. What is clear I think is that most of our witnesses really are telling us that you can have too many targets. It is very important to have a small number of targets and it is very important for staff that those targets are achievable, but do you think that organisations should expect to meet all their targets?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I do not think that it is realistic to expect every organisation to meet every target on or by a given date. That assumes a uniform level of performance which it is in the real world impossible to achieve. They must to some degree remain aspirational. In fact, in a sense, if you met them all then perhaps you are underselling what might be achievable anyway. Some of these targets ought to be a bit more aspirational and a bit more stretching.

177. But when you do that do you not encourage the problem of demotivation?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Well, that is the point. It is a question of recognising that you are not necessarily going to achieve everything you have set out to do. It does not necessarily imply criticism of the service if they do not manage to do that and that is where the league table argument comes in. So often it is used in a primitive way rather than seeing the evidence as perhaps requiring some further investigation, some change and so on, and in a more supportive and constructive way, so one should not be using them to criticise but use them as a means of advancing them. I think people respond to stretching targets and to an aspirational role provided that if they fail to meet them they do not feel they are going to be singled out for unfair criticism. That is a cultural change that we need to see from on high, really. I think it is fair to say to a degree it has changed a bit but in the early years the naming and shaming pattern we saw on occasion in other departments was very counterproductive and I think up to a point there has been a shift, and that is good.

178. One other point: do you think as a general principle that you should get more money if you are failing to meet the targets or if you are achieving all of your targets?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) There is an interesting argument about rewarding failure. I think we need to support institutions, whether they are in LGA or Health Service or wherever that are not delivering adequately, and it may be that part of that is because of under-investment and if that is a cause then that needs to be addressed. Investment should not be seen as a reward but as a necessary condition of improvement. I think up to a point it is reasonable to incentivise good performance by perhaps some additional financial reward but it has to be kept modest because, given the pressure on public resources and the evident need to invest across systems, it would be wrong to distort the pattern by simply loading money on to success, because you could simply widen the gap and create the two tiers that one fears may emerge in, say, education with, for example, poor inner city technology colleges or academies against other schools in the area, or which you might see in the Health Service with foundation hospitals which would receive significant extra resources over other hospitals. This debate is about to start, is it not, and there is some scope for that but I would not like to see too much emphasis placed on pouring money on those that are achieving.

  179. Can I ask Mike Stone about that matter of foundation hospitals?
  (Mr Stone) In terms of foundation hospitals we are very much waiting still�as Sir Jeremy said, the debate is just about to start. What we are keen not to see is a two-tier Health Service. In terms of targets they are very much management issues in many ways. What the ordinary patient is looking at is when they are in the back of an ambulance having a cardiac arrest the one thing they are interested in is the target of getting to the hospital in time, the fact that their life is going to be saved. Those are the real targets the patients see. That is the front line and where we have to come from. Looking generally, targets are set by well-meaning. The targets that are set in many cases are targets that people genuinely believe will improve the service, but they must not become tick boxes, something where people can tick that box and say "We have done that". For example, if you take community health councils in terms of their casualty watch, in one hospital they found that in the A&E the waits were getting so long that all the NHS managers did was take the wheels off eight trolleys to make them into beds rather than trolleys�that is not a meaningful target. That should not be happening.
  (Mr Thayne) Mr Brennan, you have alighted on the biggest problem of all which is the disincentive of performing. There is a disincentive to individuals and organisations to perform because there is this public service belief certainly in the NHS that we need more money and it is all down to money. If you are performing well you need less.

180. Did anyone tell you to cover up your good performance so that others would not feel embarrassed by it?
(Mr Thayne) I am not allowed any more to announce it to the press. There is a ban on me on that side.

Chairman

181. Who has banned you?
(Mr Thayne) It was the regional health authority. The problem is that if you blow your trumpet too much people in neighbouring authorities ask, "Why are we not having the same standard", but in terms of funding, �21 million worth of additional funding was put into improving response times in the UK and we were told we would get not a penny of it�our share would have been about half a million�because we had already achieved the standard. That is not a political directive: it is a civil service directive. In fact, our local politicians fought on our behalf. The minister at the time rescinded that and made an award of �150,000 which we gave to our staff for pay. So there is that disincentive. Locally all our funding comes from our local purchasers, the health authorities, now the PCTs, and if you examine our funding from 1992 to date it has been the least of any ambulance service in the UK because of our performance. We are expected year on year to improve our efficiency by 10 per cent. There is not a single organisation run by government that has that target or gets anywhere near achieving it. We see it as a challenge but it is getting increasingly difficult to meet. We have done it every year for ten but we are running out of time in being able to do that. So there is a disincentive. My colleagues in the ambulance service say that we are the fools, and therefore without any doubt the emphasis is on just about meeting your targets and saying that to improve anything or to give any improvement you need more money. That culture has to change because it very rarely is money.

Kevin Brennan: Are ambulance drivers planning a strike?

Chairman

182. So if you were doing worse you would get more money?
(Mr Thayne) Yes. Without a doubt.

183. Jeremy, when you hear this and you set this alongside all the local government material about reward for good performance and floating off to new freedom and so on, it does not add up, does it?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Freedom is not a reward. Freedoms and flexibilities are tools to achieve a better delivery of service and what we have in the local public service agreement framework is a modest performance reward if you achieve the targets that you and government have agreed are applicable to local circumstances, some of them drawn from national targets and some derived locally, and if you achieve these things then a modest amount of cash is available, but that is not the motivator. The real motivator is getting on and dealing coherently with local issues. But I can echo Roger's experience with the ambulance service with what happened over what is becoming increasingly the vexed area of hospital discharges, because extra money was awarded last year to authorities and areas which had a greater problem with this, whereas adjoining authorities which perhaps had managed to crack the issue did not receive extra resources, and there was a certain amount of resentment, let's say, in Hammersmith & Fulham compared to its neighbouring authority which had not invested its own resources in this area. But it is a dilemma because from the patients' point of view you want to see the service improving and if it takes an extra resource in that context then that has to happen. But if you are benchmarking a level of service across similar types of, in our case, authority, then you are providing the means by which elected representatives can examine and scrutinise the performance of their authority and that public demand can be articulated and the media, if they get round to doing their job, can examine how the authority or the health trust is operating and can also bring pressure to bear, so it is an iterative process in which you have to start with what is capable of being delivered and what ought to be delivered, and if there is a gap then seeing how that can be addressed. It may be a question of resources; it may be a question of the kind of management Mr Thayne has brought to Staffordshire; but good practice has to be disseminated and, in fairness, the government tries to achieve that in beacon council schemes and we in the LGA have tried to do it through the Improvement and Development agency and our own networking and so on, but I do not think that large cash inducements are themselves going to turn matters round.

Mr Hopkins

184. I have much enjoyed listening to all three of you, particularly Roger Thayne, and I would like to hear more. I agree with everything you said. You are critical of some managers and I agree that a good manager with good intelligence is worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately there are not enough of them. Sometimes poor managers are stuck in the wrong jobs for years and the whole service can be ruined as a result. I wanted to address a question to Jeremy. In your submission on the 2002 spending review you said that spending currently assumes efficiency savings of 2 per cent per annum and that �19 billion of additional funding is required. Now, I am a governor of a sixth form college and unlike schools we have had to suffer under so-called compulsory efficiency gains for years. In a labour intensive service like education this means larger classes and it is a nonsense, especially when schools do not have that pressure. Indeed, sixth form colleges are I believe the jewel in our educational crown. They do a better job of educating 16-19 year olds than any other form of education in Britain. I would stand by that and argue that case. Is it not possible to put to government that the blanket application of efficiency gains is a nonsense, especially in public services where sometimes improving a public service might mean increasing labour intensity rather than reducing it? For example, in nursing one can easily make an efficiency gain by for example cutting night nurses from two to one on a ward, but it means that patients get less good care. Improving the service, unlike manufacturing, means applying more people rather than less and one has to look at outcomes and what we are really trying to achieve, not simply apply a percentage cut in funding every year.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I entirely endorse that. That is exactly our position, that to regard efficiency savings as cash savings does not do justice to the real issue which is the question of improving services. As I said at the beginning of this session in the point I was trying to make in relation to the Fire Service, there will be some cash savings, no doubt, from some of these measures but there will probably be a greater outcome in terms of an improved service by the changes that we are seeking to put through. To expect year on year a two per cent cut in the cash as a result of savings is entirely misleading. There ought to be a mixture of cash savings in some areas and improved services in others, but some of them entirely fight against each other. If you were to increase class sizes, for example, you could say that that represents an efficiency saving but the poor old teacher has bigger classes and that then fights against another target which is to reduce class sizes. It is absurd to treat this particular target as one which in the real world can be achieved in cash terms. We continue to make that case but it does not seem to influence the spending review outcome.

185. One more point: Roger Thayne referred to performance indicators rather than targets. To me the word "targets" makes me feel uncomfortable because they may be imposed and they may not be sensible, whereas a performance indicator is a measurement and everything has to be measured to see how you are performing and that is perfectly sensible. Could we not get across to government: performance indicators, yes; impose targets, not always a good idea?
(Mr Thayne) I would agree with you. In the NHS we have an NHS net so we are all linked up and it is quite possible, just as I am looking at the performance indicators, for those to be collected centrally so that we are all using the same indicators and it would save everybody an awful lot of bureaucracy and you could drill down very quickly. Just as I can drill down to a particular team and find the problem, a senior civil servant could drill down to a particular ambulance service or hospital or whatever. I agree with you: performance indicators are key. With fixed targets you tend to have to put a level on the target when really you should be trying to produce a maximum wherever you can.

186. A brief question to Mike Stone on a different subject entirely. Is he comfortable with the Government's proposed reforms in patient representation? Is that benefiting patients?
(Mr Stone) One of the things that we were very vociferous about was that patient representation is very important, but in terms of, for example, CHCs being abolished, that is the end of what we consider to be an independent statutory body which could go into hospitals and do things like casualty watch, etc. Whilst we are happy to work with the Government in terms of patient reforms and greater patient participation, it is still important for groups such as the Patients Association to be an independent voice for patients and to be still out there and still looking at, for example, performance indicators.

Sir Sydney Chapman

187. Just on the issue of firemen, there is something in the back of my mind. Sir Jeremy, you talked about cost benefits but, if I am not taking words out of your mouth, cost benefits ultimately, whatever settlement there is�and let us hope that there will be a settlement�are going to initially involve a lot of increased back pay, so presumably the local authorities will need financial help initially from the Government?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes. We acknowledge that within the pay package, which as we speak is presumably being finalised and proffered to the union, there will be two elements. There will be an element of normal pay increases for this year and next year, and there will be an element strictly tied to modernisation. You are right to say that, at least as far as the latter is concerned, some of that will not be covered by immediate savings or may not be covered by cash savings at all, and in that sense we would hope that the Government would indeed support the fire authorities in meeting that bill. On any view there will be transitional costs which will be met. This may or may not be the right policy conclusion but if one, for example, were to equip every fire engine with new life-saving equipment and train people to use it, there is obviously an initial cost in that and there is no cash return from that. There will be other examples no doubt of that kind. It is the case and we would hope and expect a contribution from government towards meeting that cost.

188. I want to persist on what call the how and why of targets. Mr Thayne, you first of all said that the target was for an ambulance to get to a patient within eight minutes.
(Mr Thayne) It is an ambulance response, so it can be a layman with a defibrillator, a doctor, a fully equipped ambulance, a paramedic in a car.

189. The eight minutes was set because that is the maximum time in which a heart can be restored after it has stopped?
(Mr Thayne) Yes.

190. But if I had my heart stopped I would be rather anxious that somebody got to me within, say, four or six minutes. The point I am making is, why 75 per cent in eight minutes? Why not 50 per cent in six minutes? Who actually sets the target?
(Mr Thayne) That goes back in time. When the current target was set we had a lot to do with it because we were performing way above the national standard, which was 50 per cent in eight minutes for an emergency, and we persuaded the Department of Health to go and look at similar high performance ambulance services, and they are all in America. They came back with a target of 90 per cent in eight minutes and 20 per cent survival for a cardiac arrest. In the American system, just as in our system, we look very closely at how we are going to get there in four minutes because you have got to start something in four minutes. After eight minutes there is very little chance of someone surviving because for that eight minutes it depends when the clock starts. Even if somebody has a cardiac arrest people dialling treble-9 puts another minute's delay in. We would like people to ring the Ambulance Service direct and we are working on that assumption. Getting to the scene is another issue. You could say the clock stops when you are at the scene but if you are on the top story of a 21-storey block of flats and the lift is not working, it can be quite a long time after that; you are perfectly right. What we monitor is minute by minute. What I want to know is not how many do we get to, 80 per cent or 90 per cent or even 100 per cent, in eight minutes, but how many do we get to in one to four minutes. This is the argument about putting defibrillators on other emergency vehicles. In fact, the police are the best vehicles. The majority of cardiac arrests are in the home and you have got to get there in four minutes. Anybody there in eight minutes has very little chance. What you have to get there in eight minutes is advanced life support; it is a paramedic or a fireman or a policeman or a layman with a defibrillator. The centre of our system is that we want to get CPR started, defibrillation within the first four minutes and the paramedic there in eight minutes. We believe that everybody can use a defibrillator. You do not need any training at all. It tells you what to do and there are pictures as well. This has been well tested around the world. You are totally right but of course when the Government sets a target it has got to be achievable.

  191. Mr Stone, you were quoted as saying about 18 months ago in The Independent that we are meant to live in a country with a National Health Service where, whether you live in Truro or Newcastle, you should be receiving the same service. I think we all know what you mean by that but actually, in order to pick an argument, we want the best practice to be given to every local authority, every Health Service, so you do not want a level service because that would create a common denominator, would it not? You want to encourage a Fire Service in Staffordshire to perform very well and then see that that is encouraged in others.
  (Mr Stone) Absolutely. It is about learning from best practice. I would not dare suggest that The Independent misquoted me in any way, but what I can say is that, certainly as I said earlier, we do live in a country with a National Health Service but it is about applying that best practice that is available in some small pockets within the country at a national level. People may say that that is not the reality, that that cannot be done, but patients demand that that can be done. That is what patients want and it is about identifying that best practice and disseminating that best practice across the country.
  (Sir Jeremy Beecham) It is about establishing a minimum entitlement, is it not, beyond which people will hopefully seek to go?

192. Sir Jeremy, if I have read about you correctly, you first were elected a councillor 45 years ago.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) No, 35. It feels like 45.

193. Have been a councillor ever since?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Yes.

194. Oh, gosh. What I really want to ask you is this. As Chairman of the Local Government Association surely with the vast experience you have got you should be able to tell ministers, "Look: that target for that local authority is ridiculous. These are the meaningful targets you, the Government, ought to be insisting upon." Do you have a dialogue with the Government on that matter?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) We have not really had sufficient dialogue about the targets as such. We certainly did not the first time around. It has improved a bit in the last spending review. Where we have made progress, I think, is in terms of agreeing the national shared priorities about which I spoke. Within that context we need then to continue the dialogue about what sensible targets can be arrived at, not just in local government as a whole, which is where we are at on the national scene, but at local authority level, and have a local process of encouraging individual councils and government. At the moment this is a county level process but it will hopefully be rolled out to districts to identify more precisely in relation to local circumstances what appropriate targets might be set, not just for the local authority�the local authority can play its part�but it might be central government, it might be the health trust, and so on. I think there is room to move in that direction but we have not really been involved sufficiently, I think, in the national targets that are there. With regard to performance indicators, on the other hand, that has been significantly reduced. It is now below 100 nationally and it started off at over 200. Equally, in terms of the plans that counties are supposed to be producing, you will hear next week, because we are going to have an announcement about freedoms and flexibilities, about reductions in that and more reductions for local authorities which have established that they are excellent providers of service. Government is moving slowly in the right direction.

Mr Prentice

195. Just on this point, Jeremy, I have your written evidence in front of me here on the national PSA for local government. You tell us that the LGA is consulted on the targets but it is the ministers themselves who decide the target levels. What actually happens during the consultation process? Do the ministers say, "This is what we are thinking about. Can we have your reaction?", or what?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) These discussions normally take place at official level rather than between ministers and members except right at the end. To be honest, I do not think I can say that there is much effective dialogue so far on these things.

196. That means no dialogue really.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) No, I would not go that far either. The decisions are certainly taken as it were unilaterally. They are not agreed. It would perhaps be better if in terms of national targets they were agreed. I do not know quite what happens in the Health Service either but I would have thought it would be sensible for the NHS Confederation to agree targets with the Department.

197. There is a whole list of targets here in your evidence. Can I just pick very quickly on two: by 2004 reduce school truancies by ten per cent compared to 2002. Is ten per cent just plucked out of the air? Is it achievable?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) That is our impression.

198. That it is plucked out of the air?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I think it rather is. Moreover, it overlooks the somewhat limited role of local education authorities these days. Exclusions, for example, which are all part of the same pattern, are largely in the hands of individual schools and government policy is oscillating on this, discouraging exclusion on the one hand and then facilitating it on the other.

199. Could I characterise this as a meaningless target then?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) It is not meaningless in the sense that it is a figure which might be justified in practice but one does not know how it has been derived.

200. But you are going to be held to this. This is the national PSA for local government.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Exactly. The areas are areas which we agree should be looked at. The way in which particular figures are reached is something that is not transparent.

201. What a Delphic smile that was!
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) A word in my ear from Mr Warburton reminds me that it is the Government that will be held to these targets, not local authorities. These are national targets.

202. One other example on this brief of yours. Improving the quality of life and independence of older people: we all agree with that, but the Government has set a target for increasing the number of elderly people who are supported intensively to live at home up by 30 per cent by March 2006 compared with the numbers in residential care. Did the Local Government Association in its discussions with officials that you talked about a few moments ago go along with that because there are huge implications for the number of residential care homes for the elderly that local authorities run?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) The problem is that we do not run residential care for the elderly very largely.

203. In Lancashire, which is my own county, there are over 40 residential care homes for the elderly, to be reduced to about ten, and the county council is saying that it is the Government that sets it.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Precisely. For many years under the preceding administration there was a very distinct push to get local government out of the business of providing residential care and the financial scales were tilted very largely to ensure that that happened because authorities received less money for residents that we cared for directly than the people being paid for in the private sector. Now, of course, the private sector is in considerable difficulties. The local authorities' capacity has been much reduced and there is a very serious problem around residential care. I do not know the detail of the discussions that may have taken place about the particular target but it is certainly the aspiration of local government to support people in their own homes wherever possible to have intermediate care so that they are not in long term residential care unless that is absolutely necessary. I do not know to what extent we were involved in this figure but what we are saying is that if you are looking at care of the elderly this has to be a whole systems approach. It has to involve the health services, the local authority�not just local authority social services but also housing and other services, including things like transport and leisure and so on�if you are going to give people quality of life. Different councils deal with this either on an institutional basis or by looking particularly at acute problems which may arise, for example, in the case of hospital discharges, at that point. What you actually need to do, and this is an area which will emerge as the new bill is debated, is in the first place to prevent people going into any A&E units or into hospital in the first place. For that you need effective collaboration across services both within local government and with other partners. Only in that way could you hope to achieve a measurable reduction in people being either in hospital or in residential care when, given the choice, they would prefer to be at home with support.

204. I understand that. My final point is back to this whole thing about centralism and localism. In the papers you left with us you say that the LGA accepts that central government has the right to set standards and targets for local government in relation to national priorities. Does that mean that a minister can wake up in the morning and say, "There should be a national target for inspection of greasy spoon cafe�s"? Does it mean that the Government can capriciously decide that there should be a national target for any service produced by local government or does the LGA take the view that with the new localism there should be areas ring-fenced and it should be up to local people to decide without interference from central government?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) Our approach has been to say that we can agree and should agree, and we now have agreed, significant areas of public policy in which central and local government commit themselves to a joint approach to achieve shared goals. These are the shared priorities. We would say that that needs to be followed through by genuine partnership in terms of agreeing what targets you wish to achieve in selected areas rather than across the whole piste, and up to a point how they are to be achieved, but you want to allow for innovation, you want to allow for risk�taking. We have a very risk-averse culture in government in this country and failure is deemed to be something which is impermissible but actually you cannot innovate without taking some risk. We must be able to pilot new ideas and see what works and what does not. In that sense it would be wrong for ministers to act in the way you describe, although technically speaking there is nothing to stop them doing it. If I may make one other point, there is a recognition now that actually there needs to be capacity building within local government and I think the same is recognised within the Health Service, so that the kind of management that Mr Thayne has obviously brought to his service in Staffordshire is something that spreads through local government, both at government level and at official level. The Government has agreed matches funding with the LGA in terms of, significantly, an �18 million programme to build the kind of capacity which hopefully will help us achieve attainable goals and disseminate good practice. It is very interesting to hear that Mr Thayne has come into the Ambulance Service from the Army and has brought his experience and his management skills to bear on an organisation. I have to say, going back again to where we started, that that would not have been possible within the Fire Service because in the Fire Service you start at the basic fireman grade and you cannot get any position beyond that unless you have started at the basic grade. I think that is an extreme example of an ossified structure but I think we need in local government and in central government, and perhaps in the public sector generally, to acknowledge that we need an infusion of skill and experience from outside, not in the form of hiving off the services or privatising the services, but attracting into the services people with a variety of skills and experience. That I think will help generally inform the debate about services and improve them and help everybody reach the priority targets that we ought to be concerned with.

Chairman

205. Could I pick up one point that Gordon raised, which is where these targets come from and who they are for? In your evidence, Roger, you say very strongly, "We consider it is important that the targets set are those which the public set". It is very interesting, is it not? That is a crucial proposition, that the targets in some sense should be set by the public. What we need to know is how on earth do the public set targets. How do you know that the targets you set or any organisation sets are the public's targets? And a supplementary question would be, if you left it to the public they would set targets which would probably discriminate against all kinds of groups that we do not want to discriminate against and give priorities to all kinds of things that we may not think should be prerogatives. What do you mean by it?
(Mr Thayne) When we were closing all the ambulance stations you can imagine that normally that would cause a public furore. What we did was to go along with the ambulance staff ourselves and talk at public meetings and say, "This is what we want to do to ensure that you get an ambulance more quickly". We had no problem at all in Staffordshire in closing all the ambulance stations because they were an anachronism and they were costing a lot of money and they did not improve patient care. You have to have that day to day regular contact. We do that a lot through the media, as you know. We get about ten media inserts a day in Staffordshire on local radio or whatever, because there are 1.2 million people to talk to. If we were not a public service but a business we would certainly have to take notice of what the customer wants and those are the people who have to set the targets and those targets will be completely different from what the Government says. Certainly in the Health Service, and if we take the ambulance service targets, it is to get there as quickly as possible, it is to take people to the appropriate hospital; pretty simple stuff. I think we can make life far too complicated for everybody and divorce management not only from the staff but also from the customers that they are serving and go into this government gobbledygook that nobody understands and then they certainly do not get the service.

206. I can quite see that with you what a manager might think the public needs and what the public thinks it needs are the same, that is, that the ambulance should get there quickly and that they save lives. I think that is fairly straightforward. But if we go a bit broader and say, should the priority of the Health Service be to give money to mental health or to cancer care, then it seems to me you are in difficult territory and it is not at all clear that you necessarily do whatever the public wants.
(Mr Stone) I think that is quite right. The public do not have the general knowledge to set those targets. It is about working in partnership, as Roger has been saying, and having that communication process and there needs to be a basic partnership the whole time. What we have seen is that the patients particularly are very hungry for information. They want to know who the best doctor is in a specific region; they want to know where the best hospital is, but with things like you have seen in The Times this week on things like the Dr Foster issue, we are not getting that information given to us from the Department of Health. We are having to rely on outside agencies coming up with a guide as to who is the best doctor within a specific area or within a generality. It is about partnership and it is about knowledge.

Michael Trend

207. A fundamental problem is if the statistics are not compiled in a straightforward and reliable way. Mr Thayne was asked, we were informed, earlier this year to do a report for the Ambulance Service Association which they later dismissed as only one man's view, in which a number of figures included one which said that 3.5 per cent of calls were reached within zero minutes, which did not give one confidence in the reliability of the figures. Perhaps Mr Thayne might say something about the report first and then I can ask Sir Jeremy what confidence can we have in targets if they are being manipulated?
(Mr Thayne) Those targets set are based on time and it is very difficult to lay down when the clock starts and when the clock finishes. If we get to hospital with a patient and the hospital is not ready to receive that patient for a couple of hours and there is a trolley waiting at the side they take them off the ambulance trolley and they may then be waiting there for six hours. That is one example. When you get to outcomes it is a bit more difficult. You can be pretty sure that wherever you are measuring an outcome you can dictate that reasonably well. Our principal target is our outcome target and what we have to make sure is that there is a relationship there between all the other targets that lead to that outcome. For instance, even though our response performance might be very high, if we are not getting those outcomes we will be very concerned and do something about that, but we need that transferred into the whole. The principal problem is that if you join the NHS and say, "Let me have a look at the patient handbook on how to run an ambulance service, a GP practice, a hospital" and so on, it is very difficult to manage because if you move from one end of the service to another you may have to learn to operate it in a different way. We were talking about bringing people in from outside. It is not necessarily that. If we had systems for better training, and certainly one for leadership, we could stop wasting a lot of money and do things slightly differently.

208. We understand your report concluded that improvements in the ambulance response time were as much to do with bending rules and inaccurate recording as with improved operating practices, what one paramedic called the magic pen. Sir Jeremy, in the light of that this must be surely common throughout the public services. What reliability can we place on targets when the figures appear to be cooked?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I do not think that the figures are deliberately cooked. I would be foolish to imagine that that can never happen. Our experience is that sometimes you get mistakes in returns, failure to return (from local authorities in particular), which will complicate matters, but there is a service which is there to validate much of the calculation, and at national level there is the National Statistical Office which should and does keep an eye on things, although even that organisation is capable of making mistakes, as we found out in last year's pay round when they produced earnings figures which seemed to be incorrect and did not give sufficient weight to the modest earnings of bankers in London which rather distorted the national pay figures. On the whole as an organisation they do, as far as national statistics go, make sure they are kept fairly tightly on the straight and narrow. Certainly in my own authority I remember occasions when we simply sent in the wrong information through a clerical error or whatever. Taken across government as a whole I think the figures are pretty robust. What is more interesting in a way is the question the Chairman asked before, how targets are derived in the first place and what is the statistical or other basis for those. More attention at that end would be worth having.

209. I am still worried about the liability. In Mr Thayne's evidence he has explained to us how you can define in different ways the beginning of a request to have an ambulance. This must be widespread throughout the public service, that people who, for a variety of perverse incentives, wish to present one set of figures rather than another can do so by recording them in different ways.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) It is a question of not comparing like with like; that is certainly true, and it may be that that needs to be dealt with more effectively.

210. I am not certain you have read the Ambulance Service report of Mr Thayne's.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) No, I have not seen it. It sounds very interesting.

211. Why has Roger Thayne made such a success of this? Why are there not more Thaynes in the public service?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I would hesitate to say that there are more Thaynes in the public service because he has an extremely impressive record, but there are very good managers and there are many examples of extremely capable managers in the public service, local authorities, health authorities and elsewhere. I have to say that one of the problems is that they are constantly under public scrutiny and pressure in government and from other sources which makes life very taxing. We had a good chief executive who opted to leave us to go into the private sector, partly for financial reward but partly because it is a less pressured existence and you are not under the microscope to the same extent as you are in the public service and it takes a particular kind of personality to thrive within that context. But there are very able people.

212. I have no doubt of that, but this seems to me to be an outstanding success story.
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) That is right. It is perhaps a little difficult to take a uniformed service like that, or the Fire Service or the Police Service, and compare it with the generality because there is a different tradition, there is a difference of culture within those services, and it may be that if you have experience of another uniformed service with a very good track record, which Mr Thayne clearly has had, it is possibly rather easier for him with his perspective of that than it would be for somebody else.

213. Maybe I should ask Roger Thayne what does he think is the secret of his success, and I am sure he would not overplay it but maybe it is something to do with the fact that in the Army facts have to be right or big trouble occurs.
(Mr Thayne) I certainly found that the Army had far more capability for innovation, far better training and you learned from an early age to lead as well as manage. In the Ambulance Service we do not have any separate disciplinary code. It is very much a normal public service like the rest of the NHS and we are very much part of the NHS. It is difficult at the moment because it is a dispersed workforce. The basic problem that I see is that every single ambulance service has to design its own personnel procedures, its own operational procedures. That has to be absolutely crazy. No wonder we spend so much time on management and then we get visited and told that our procedures are not very good but nobody can tell us what the good ones are. You train consultants, you train nurses but you do not train managers how to run that hospital or that ambulance service. The idea that what we do should be in every ambulance service is totally against the culture that says you do not train people to run anything. That is the fundamental problem. If you do not train people to run systems to allow the people that look after the patients to do that properly, then it will be very poor, very ineffective and you will blame the people who are doing superb work in poor systems.

Chairman

214. Could I just ask Sir Jeremy, do you need to go now or can you give us five minutes?
(Sir Jeremy Beecham) I really need to go now. I have to see the Minister about some targets.

  215. Perhaps Mr Matthew Warburton, who has, to use Gordon's words, the Delphic title of Head of Futures from the LGA, can stay to assist us. Before you go, Sir Jeremy, is there a case for now having an integrated Fire and Ambulance Service?
  (Mr Thayne) No.
  (Sir Jeremy Beecham) I agree with that, but there is a case for closer collaboration between all the emergency services.

Brian White

216. Can I follow up where you were coming from there because it seems to me that there have always been leaders in public sector organisations. There is a whole range of public sector organisations who coast and there are a few laggards. The leaders will always meet the targets. Are not targets a catalyst, not for people like yourselves who meet targets, but for the coasters who are doing all right and the laggards who are falling behind? Could you have the same targets right through?
(Mr Thayne) If there were no national targets you would not get the same concentration on performance, so I think they are necessary. It is certainly necessary for my organisation to see how we are performing. For instance, everybody has a response performance, and indeed our individual appraisals are down to people's performance. You can call them performance indicators or targets; it does not matter what you call them but you have to measure your performance, particularly in public service where you are given public money to provide that service.

217. Somewhere in my dim and distant past memory I recall that one of my colleagues tried to design the computer systems in the Ambulance Service and I think it was in Staffordshire. There were massive arguments about whether that particular system was the right system compared to the ones in London and in other ambulance services. If you had the kind of centralised system you were talking about you would not have got the kind of performance measures that you have got and you would be stuck trying to measure things with inadequate infrastructure. How do you get round that problem?
(Mr Thayne) There are a number of points there. There is certainly not a single ambulance service in the NHS with inadequate resources. I have never found that they like using those resources in the best way.

218. So all computer systems are capable of giving the kind of information that you need?
(Mr Thayne) There is no computer system in the world that is giving all the information. You have to widen that information and you have to know what the key information is. That is part of developing systems. We benchmark with 22 other services around the world, most of them in North America, who operate in a similar way. Most of them are private. In fact, we are the only publicly provided system. The view generally is that the efficient systems like ourselves will be killed by the public service; they will screen them out. They will starve them of funds until they collapse on their own. We are determined to prove that is not the case. The computer system is just one part of the jigsaw. Yesterday for an hour we did not use the computer system because we were reverted to paper just to check things out. We achieved the eight per cent without the computer system, but the computer system has made it easier.

219. I was going to move on to how you monitor targets, and the classic example at the moment is health and the controversy going on there, but when you move away from specific targets and a whole range of targets to trying to give an indication of whether an authority is performing well or not, when you move to those generalised indicators, do you then get into the kinds of problems that cause people to say that there is no evidence here and people have spoken to the wrong people? How do you monitor the targets in a way that is meaningful?
(Mr Warburton) I would like to come back to the issue that was being discussed a little while ago where I think there was a very useful distinction made between the outcomes which were sought and the management information that managers need in order to know whether they are on track. Those two things we need to treat as being in a dynamic relationship, that it is the outcomes that matter. We have got a good idea of what the indicators are that tell us whether we are on the way, but we have always got to be prepared to learn.

220. So this star system that we have got in local government services or in the NHS is a waste of time, is it?
(Mr Warburton) It is a very crude guide to the overall performance of what are large and complex organisations. I think one message that we will be wanting to give out very strongly when the comprehensive performance assessment results are announced in December is that we will be very pleased to see a significant number of councils being judged excellent but nobody should be under any illusion that those councils have got nowhere to go in terms of further improvement. There will still be cracked pavements in those councils.
(Mr Stone) That is certainly the same with hospitals. It is all very well having the three star, the two star and the one star hospitals and, going back to what we were saying earlier about where that money is allocated, in terms of the fact that there are financial penalties for the hospitals that are not achieving that opens up the whole question of whether that should be the case. You have to have some guide and the Department in their wisdom have dictated that it is a star guide in terms of one, two and three stars. It is an inadequate system but it is certainly somewhere where we have got to start to take the best practice and disseminate that best practice across all hospitals.

Annette Brooke

221. I wondered if I could particularly address some questions to Mr Thayne. Could you comment a bit, Mr Thayne, on how you manage your staff in this dynamic management method that you are obviously using? Are they rewarded for meeting targets? What other measures do you use to carry your staff with you?
(Mr Thayne) Certainly what we have done as an ambulance service is manage to cope with about a 60 or 70 per cent increase in activity and reduce staff in terms of numbers. That has allowed us to provide more training, better equipment for the staff and uniforms and certainly they are paid approximately seven per cent above the Whitley national standard. That is a collective. What we do not have is a sort of bonus system. You do not get a bonus for every life you save. It is very difficult to do that and I do not think people are doing it for that reason, but I do feel that as systems become more efficient the staff should benefit. We also do not believe that senior managers on executive pay should be out of kilter with the staff pay. Whatever pay rise the staff get, that is what we get. Therefore, if you are looking at our executive pay it is way out of kilter to the rest of the Ambulance Service.

222. Have there been difficulties with pace of change in working practices? Have staff reacted adversely to the pace of change?
(Mr Thayne) What you would find if you visited us is that you would not find a single member of staff that would say that our system is bad for patients. You would find lots of people that would say that we have to work harder. It is very demanding, but nobody would tell you it is bad for patients.

223. Does the funding of the Ambulance Service, which obviously comes indirectly from the regional health authority to the PCTs, still have a very strong historical base and then just add-ons in terms of extra requirements? Do you negotiate your whole performance plan each year?
(Mr Thayne) We do not have too much trouble with that. We broker our own service level agreement for the purchasers which sets standards fairly high. We have to negotiate that on a contract basis every year. We are still involved with competitive tendering and market testing. I have to say that certainly what we have noticed of late is a massive increase of funding, a lot of it from central sources, so certainly in the last 12 months we have had better funding than we have ever seen. There is no shortage of funding. What there is difficulty in doing is gearing up and training people to meet the extra demands of that funding. We certainly have seen a major improvement and that direction, which has come down from the centre in terms of meeting the ambulance funding, has rubbed off on our local purchasers. There are no problems there at all.

224. Is that central funding directly related to current targets?
(Mr Thayne) Yes.

Chairman

225. I have a couple of final questions. Roger, you do not pull your punches and we like that. You say that as many as 6,000 lives could be saved in England alone if the performance of Staffordshire was extrapolated throughout the country. That is a shocking statement, and then you say that this needs investigation as to why the Department of Health does not think it worthwhile doing this. Just tell us quickly why it does not.
(Mr Thayne) The actual figures are put in there from the Which report by Dr van Dellen who is our part-time medical adviser. I would say 13,000 more people would have arrived at hospital alive of which at least a third should walk out. It is getting close to that sort of figure that you mention there in the UK as a whole. It is quite frightening but it is correct; this can be done. We have no better paramedics in Staffordshire than they have in London or Scotland or Cornwall or anywhere else. They are all capable of doing it. They have got the funding, they have got the equipment. It is just the procedures. This could be done. It does need investigation. It is pretty dramatic stuff.

226. But why would the Department of Health, if it wants a better Health Service, not want to put in place actions that would give outcomes like that?
(Mr Thayne) With respect, you are in the Government; I am not. I do not understand why.

227. Let me ask one final question. This takes us back to where we started. Targets are only a means to an end. The end is to get better public services. We have heard an example from you of how one particular service was turned round. Many public services are not turned round. Many public services are in need of reform. Why can they not do it themselves routinely without some big bang external intervention of the kind that targets represent? How can we have dozy local authorities not performing well for their public year in, year out? Why are there no pressures in the system to turn them round? Why do not the democratic pressures work? Why do not the citizenry say, "This is not acceptable"? Why does not the professional culture kick in and make it better? Why do not all kinds of things happen? If they do not happen why does it take the importation of someone from the Army to come and shape things up to produce radical improvements? What is going wrong with public sector organisations that seemingly requires this kind of central intervention to shake the whole thing up?
(Mr Warburton) It is something we are very clear on in relation to local government, that improvement can only come from within.

228. But it has not done.
(Mr Warburton) That is as may be and we can spend a long time elaborating on the causes of that. It is very clear that there are no easy answers. When we get the results of the first comprehensive performance assessment of local government I think it will be very clear that there are poor and excellent councils which are safe Labour controlled, which are safe Conservative controlled, possibly safe Liberal Democrat controlled, which are hung or balanced, which have a history of instability, all of these things which might in the past have been used as reasons to explain why performance might be better or worse but do not seem to be very useful in explaining why some places are committed to improvement, well managed and forging ahead whereas others are not. It is absolutely right to make the point that there is no room for complacency in this situation. What we have to say is that all our experience suggests that the Government's concern and attempt to deal with the problem from the top cannot substitute for generating local leadership and commitment to deal with the problem from below and that is as much a matter, I would argue, for the political parties and the professions as it is for, if you like, councils as organisations and for government as an organisation.

Sir Sydney Chapman

229. I have a point of clarification and I think you will agree it is an important point of clarification. Mr Thayne said that when there was a pay increase for ambulancemen in Staffordshire the management got the same increase. You are presumably referring to percentage terms rather than actual money terms?
(Mr Thayne) Percentage.

Kelvin Hopkins

230. It seems that Roger started at the grass roots, found out what was wrong and organised it better. I remember some years ago there was some research done on direct labour organisations in the local authorities building sector. They found that one local authority had a DLO which was four times more efficient than another. Why cannot local authorities learn from that experience and say, "Let us find the best method and apply it to everybody"?
(Mr Warburton) It is the same thing. Some clearly can and some cannot. We have some part of the answer. We know that there are some skills which are very short in local government. We know that there are areas where capacity needs to be developed. We are actively discussing with the Government how we bring programme support to local services and capacity, but it would be completely wrong to suggest that anybody actually knows what the full answer to this problem is. We are dealing with what I would argue is a very complex issue and making progress but progress which is slower than we, and clearly you, would expect.

Chairman: Thank you for that. The only clear lesson to emerge is that all sensible people are going to locate in Staffordshire to have a secure future. We are very grateful to all our witnesses. We have had a very good session. Thank you, Mr Warburton, for substituting for Sir Jeremy unwarned, and thank you, Mr Thayne, for coming down from Staffordshire.

[top]

MR JOHN BANGS, MRS JAN BERRY AND MR CLINT ELLIOTT

THURSDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2002

Chairman

231. Can I welcome our witnesses this morning. It is kind of you to come along. I have just heard that Doug McAvoy is not able to be here.

(Mr Bangs) Yes. He sends his apologies. He lives in York and there is a problem with the trains and he was not able to get down in time. I was going to accompany him to give evidence, and my job is to look at the impact of targets, so I have properly researched the subject.

232. We got a good deal then. Thank you very much indeed. Welcome, Mrs Berry. Should I call you Chief Inspector?
(Mrs Berry) No, Chairman of the Police Federation is fine. Can I introduce Clint Elliott, who is the General Secretary of the Police Federation.

  233. You know what we are about. We are pursuing targets, league tables, and all that, as part of the reform of public services. Do any of you want to say a word by way of introduction?
  (Mr Bangs) First of all, I am John Bangs. I am Assistant Secretary, Education and Equal Opportunities at the National Union of Teachers, and my job is to be responsible, as the senior official, for education policy within the building. One of the areas is National Curriculum test targets, for example, and the other is targets set by government, including targets for exclusion and truancy, for example. We have submitted some evidence to you on that. What I want to focus on is: where does government get its targets from? Are they appropriate? Is it appropriate just to concentrate on outcome targets or should we be measuring qualitatively the success and the efficiency of government investment and are there better ways? Finally, I noted Michael Bishard's comments to you when he was talking to you earlier on as part of your investigation, when he said that inappropriate targets affect behaviours, and if they are inappropriate can also lower morale rather than raise morale. As a basis, I think that is a good start.
  (Mrs Berry) We are obviously facing police reform, which is part of the modernisation of public services, and clearly improving professionalism and standards is part of that. Police officers accept that performance indicators and targets have to be set, but I think we also think that they need to be what the words say, targets and indicators, and that there are a number of other factors that come into play with regard to whether you actually need them. Last week we had the first National Policing Plan published by the Home Secretary. This was going to rationalise the in excess of 130 different performance measurements and indicators, and although it looks as if there are about ten within the Plan, I suspect when that has trickled down into local policing areas and the local police station, there will be a lot more than ten indicators that police officers will be judged on. I think police officers accept that they are accountable, they accept that there need to be statistics and recording, but what they expect to see in return is that some qualitative assessments are made, which I think is very much what John has just said, as opposed to the tendency to work with the easy to count things, which do not necessarily take into account the demands of the public in respect of policing and the visibility of professional police officers.

234. Let us start with the NUT. The NUT tends to be against things, does it not? I have your paper here. You are against narrow measures of achievement and unreliable data. Does that mean that you are in favour of wide measures of achievement and reliable data?
(Mr Bangs) We are in favour of evidence-based objective-setting, and we are in favour of evidence informing policy. I would like to very briefly concentrate on the National Curriculum test targets that we have at the moment. You will have noticed in the media and the press yesterday that there was a response to the OFSTED finding that, because the Government had not achieved its targets in literacy and numeracy, somehow the literacy and numeracy strategies had failed. In my view, they are and they have been a major success, but somehow the failure to reach what I believe to be arbitrarily set targets has turned an enormous success into failure. Let me give you a very specific example of success. I used to teach in Tower Hamlets for 18 years, so I am umbilically linked to the authority; I know what goes on and still keep in touch. For English at Key Stage 2, the national percentage for getting young children at level one�that is when they are seven�to level four, at the end of Key Stage 2, when they are 11�level one is below the average at Key Stage 1�is 32 per cent. In Tower Hamlets, with a Bangladeshi population of round about 65-70 per cent, and also a big turnover, demographically shifting all the time, they managed to take the number of pupils progressing from level one to level four to 53 per cent. This is over 20 per cent higher than the national average. This is an enormous success, yet because Tower Hamlets failed to meet its nationally set target, it is considered to be a stuck authority. The point I am making is there are better measures than that for evaluating what is an enormous success for young people and for teachers.

235. That is a very nice example, and we are very grateful to you for it, but it does enable me to ask the question again. If some existing measurements and targets suffer from some of the defects that you describe, is your campaign for better targets?
(Mr Bangs) First of all, I think it is absolutely legitimate for government to measure the efficiency and the effectiveness of investment. No government, when it invests in the public services, would not want to measure the impact. Let us look at OFSTED for example. We can argue about the specifics of that, but actually in general, we have an evaluation agency which is now 10 years old and is becoming more accepted amongst teachers as part of the system, as part of the daily, weekly and yearly lives of teachers. If we had a percentage which said the number of schools coming out of special measures or the number of schools coming out of serious weaknesses, that as a measure of the whole school effectiveness is an effective measure of investment in schools. There is also a trend which I think is not noticed and which I find less objectionable towards what are called floor targets. If you were to say no authority, based on the evidence of the value-added that they give to young people, was to fall below X target, that is a better way than setting arbitrarily high targets, outcome targets, such as the ones we have for National Curriculum tests at the moment.

236. But we are now on the eve of getting our first value-added league tables. Is this not something you have been asking for for many years? Is it not a great advance? Does it not precisely measure the ability of a school to move in the right direction, although it is being measured arbitrarily against other schools in different conditions?
(Mr Bangs) I have a problem with school performance tables because you can get a very good OFSTED report and you can be at the bottom of the league table and be considered the worst school in London or the worst school in a particular area. I have a problem with that. You are saying value-added. Value-added should strip out that effect, because you are starting from a point of what the young person achieves or that cohort of young people achieve when they come into the system, and the measurement of their achievement as they come out at the end of that particular phase of schooling. That is all very well, but it does not take into account the current system of value-added, social deprivation, nor does it take into account very high levels of movement of pupil populations. There are a very large number of schools where young people come in and out of schooling within that particular phase. I am much more comfortable with OFSTED being able to identify through public reports a school that is doing well and a school that is doing badly, and if it is a question of choosing measures�and we have an overlap of measures at the moment. We have performance tables overlapping OFSTED reports. If you want a whole picture, and parents do want a whole picture of their schools, go to the OFSTED report, not the school performance table.

237. So if we had a cluster of measures, rather like the way that it is being done in local government at the moment with the Comprehensive Performance Assessment, which can produce these bandings of councils, you would be very happy with that, would you?
(Mr Bangs) I think there is a strong argument for local education authorities to be as open and as accountable for their performance as schools are through inspection. We have never opposed this. In fact, we advocated it first actually in January 1996 in a pamphlet we produced saying that local education authorities ought to be evaluated for their performance, and there is a useful debate about the kind of general targets that ought to be set for local authorities.

238. Assuming we do all the things that you say we ought to do in relation to this, is there a target regime and a league table regime that the NUT might support, or would it, as I said at the beginning, still be against everything?
(Mr Bangs) First of all, we are not against everything.

239. I am trying to find out what you are in favour of.
(Mr Bangs) We are in favour, as I said, of an inspection agency that would describe the quality of education in local education authorities, education authority by local education authority; an inspection agency that describes the individual performance of schools; and we are in favour of exploring, as opposed to the current headline outcome targets that we have at the moment, floor targets below which a local education authority should not sink.

240. Some of that could convert into some kind of banding or classification or league table or whatever if we get the right measurements.
(Mr Bangs) I have to say that I have a real problem with crude bandings and classifications.

241. It is not crude. We have just been through that. They are now sophisticated bandings.
(Mr Bangs) Perhaps, Chairman, you could describe the bandings that you consider sophisticated.

242. You just described to us what it had to be, and I said would it be like the CPA in local government, and you said yes, which is going to produce these different categories, so I am asking you now, if we got to that point with all the things you want us to do, would those kinds of classifications be all right?
(Mr Bangs) I am absolutely in favour of describing levels of local authorities which actually respond to the evidence which they can produce and the baseline from which they should be proceeding. If you start with an evaluation system which evaluates the performance right the way across the piece, and then demonstrate the value-added that they can give to schools and pupils, I am in favour of that, yes.

243. One similar kind of question for the police. You were talking about the National Policing Plan just now, and you were doubtful that in fact it did look like a reduction in the target regime, even though it looked as though it might be. Is your essential case, as we have heard from some other witnesses, that you would like many fewer targets, with more discretion left to local public bodies and police forces to work out first of all their own additional targets, but also how they are going to deliver the targets that do come down from the centre?
(Mrs Berry) I think you are right. I think it is quite right for the Government to set general standards, to set general targets, but I think it is important, particularly for our style of policing in the UK, for the actual determination of what the target for particular local areas should be, to be set locally and not nationally. That said, we have limited resources�even though we have more police officers we have limited resources�we have increasing demand, so you have to prioritise, you have to decide what, in a particular policing area, are going to be your priorities, and I think that is quite rightly the role of government, but the way in which that then works through in a practical sense at a police station level or at a police force level is that you need to look at the actual needs of that area. They may not have, as we have seen recently, a street crime problem. I do not know of too many areas that do not have a drugs problem, but they may not have problems which are evident in other areas, so it is important that the locality has a huge say in what their priorities will be.

Mr Hopkins

244. I should say first of all that my wife was a teacher before she retired, and she was Divisional President of the NUT in our county, so I have had these conversations at the breakfast table over many years. Sometimes the conversations were very tense, but, I do have strong views on these matters, but it is your views that we are interested in, not mine. You have given us figures for Tower Hamlets which are very impressive. Does that not demonstrate that the regime, even with its frustrations for teachers, actually works?
(Mr Bangs) It demonstrates the importance of data, but the way in which data is used at the moment I think undermines the usefulness of that in terms of describing the success of schools and the success of local education authorities. I have a very deep concern about the future. The Government is described as having failed to meet its English and Mathematics targets. I have said that actually, that particular failure is masking enormous success, and I have given the example of what I think is enormous success, and that is replicated across other authorities as well. But I have an even deeper concern with the targets for 2004. Schools in England are expected to have a 10 per cent rise in English between now, 2002, and 2004, at Key Stage 2. They are expected to have a 12 per cent rise in Mathematics between now and 2004. At Level 5 at Key Stage 2, they are expected to have a 6 per cent rise and a 5 per cent rise. It may or may not be achievable for that higher level, but I have to say that the stress and the distortions that are going to be imposed on the curriculum to try and achieve that over two years�a 10 per cent rise�are going to be enormous. I have not talked about effects on schooling, but we conducted some research with Cambridge University recently, with Maurice Galton and John Macbeath, and what they found was that the impact on the National Curriculum at year six has led to the Humanities being squeezed, to Art not being taught at all, and to an enormous amount of practising going on for tests, and that is because local authorities, feeling the heat on the back of their necks to try and achieve targets, have pressed schools to achieve the targets set for individual schools, and everything has gone by the board to do that. If you are a young person in year six, it can be one of the best years of your life. You are in a sense emerging from all your schooling at primary school, you should be able to tackle all these wonderful things, and suddenly you are into practice testing and you have parents worrying themselves sick about it as well. The Curriculum is being massively squeezed in year six. That is not me saying that; that is Cambridge University. That is the effect of narrow target-setting.

245. I will be devil's advocate to an extent. Is not reaching adulthood with poor literacy or no literacy possibly the most disabling thing that one can experience in life, and is the government not right to focus on literacy above all? The association between poor literacy, unemployment, crime and so on is so important and so fundamental that the Government in a sense has a point.
(Mr Bangs) I absolutely agree with you. Incidentally, you are right, Chairman, to pick out that in the press we are described as being negative. We are not negative. We are absolutely in favour of the literacy and numeracy strategies. I have always argued for them. They were an entitlement for teachers. Professional development was never in place to introduce the National Curriculum in English and in Mathematics. It is there. I had criticism about its delivery at the beginning, but now we have a set of expert teachers and consultants at every local education authority level, therefore it is absolutely vital that those strategies are embedded, that teachers own them. There are rumours going around amongst consultants and local education authorities that unless schools and local education authorities achieve the targets set in 2004, the Government is considering withdrawing the money from literacy and numeracy strategies. I could not think of a dafter action, because I absolutely agree with you: literacy and numeracy is the core of everything else.

246. If I were sitting there and you were sitting here, I might have made some of the same sort of comments. There are other factors in numeracy and literacy failures in schools than teachers and how hard they work. Would you like to comment on those factors, not to give excuses for failure, but there are other factors which I know of in my constituency, which is like Tower Hamlets in many ways.
(Mr Bangs) I do not think the Government is ever going to get its literacy and numeracy strategies perfectly right, because you always develop. I noticed that the Chief Inspector, for instance, criticised teaching phonics, for example in his report, and he is right to pick up weaknesses. The way in which you actually tackle weaknesses is that you engage teachers in discussion, listen to their ideas about improvement in teaching of literacy and numeracy and build on it in that way. I also think that we all underestimate the impact of demographic change as it affects schools at the micro level. We really do underestimate that. People criticise inspectors and criticise teachers for making excuses about achievement. We have hundreds of examples of literally one year coming in at the beginning of key stage 2, for instance, say, at year three, and half the class disappearing by year six. Demographic change is important. We should also listen to school communities when they talk about the changing demography of the population around the school as well. It can change massively over the time that a child is in there, and that has an impact. I do not want to use social deprivation as an excuse, but it does have an identifiable impact.

Mr Trend

247. May I first say that I remain unhappy about the non-appearance of Mr McAvoy. An invitation from a Select Committee is a very serious matter. Many people come from all over the country, and come the night before if there is any question that they might not arrive on time. I have every confidence that he will want to communicate with the Committee in some detail as to why this has happened, because in my experience of the Select Committee it has never happened before. Meanwhile, we are grateful to Mr Bangs, who is here to help us today. I really want to turn to the Police Federation, if I may, and ask one or two questions about the targets as they affect policing. If you imagine parliamentary members from the Thames Valley going to meet senior officers once or twice a year, that is very helpful and we get to see the full scope of police work, but there is a tendency on the part of those working at the managerial level of the police to wish to explain in great detail about all the managerial targets they have set and how they are doing and all the rest of it, and a great reluctance on the part of MPs to listen to this because they want to talk about public perceptions and how it is on their patch. Particularly with these managerial targets, I think there is a danger that the police, in a very managerial phase of their history, have become slightly obsessed with these new PR tools, and in fact, they do not work very well with the public and with us. Do you have anything to say about that?
(Mrs Berry) I think you are highlighting the difference between quantitative assessments and what people's experience of policing actually is. I think in comparison with teaching, although we have had crime statistics for as long as I can remember, we are still in policing in the early days as far as performance measurement is concerned, and there is an argument from the public that it does not really match their experience of policing. The concern I have is that a member of the public can telephone a police station, we will judge ourselves on how quickly we pick that telephone up, we will judge ourselves on how quickly we then respond to the call. There will be no judgement whatsoever on how well we speak to the person, what type of information we get from them when we speak to them in the first instance, whether that person could have been diverted to another agency if that was more appropriate to deal with the incident than ourselves. There is no qualitative assessment on that whatsoever. So I think the experience of a member of the public can be that they are seeking one thing from us, but we are seeking to respond to performance measurements rather than to respond to what they are asking from us.

  248. Again, I can only speak from experience of my own constituency, which is a very large one, that there has been a certain amount of reorganisation, and I am sure a lot of this rationalisation is perfectly sensible. So there are now banks of people to talk to on the telephone, who are filling in email and computer networks, and this is all a big step forward, but in a sense, they are producing statistics to show how quickly they answer the phone, when in fact, if you ring up to say your car has been stolen, this is purely an insurance function as far as the police is concerned now, and the public are not getting perhaps the comfort or support they feel they need, although the figures will probably show vast improvements in time.
  (Mrs Berry) When we started having opinion surveys as to what the public wanted from their police, we started with a very open-ended question. Then we realised that we probably would not be able to meet their demands, and so the questions were honed down into "Here are 10 items. Put them in your order of priority." So we gave them a choice and said, "Of these, what would you like us to do?" never really asking them in the first place what they expected the police to do. I believe from meetings I have had with the public that what they want is a professional police service which is extremely visible, that they can communicate with much more easily than they can at the moment. You make an extremely good point. When you phone a police station now, you are more likely to get an answerphone, or you have to go through a series of different call centres before you can even speak to a human being. I think policing has always benefited from this human interface, which is something that professional police officers are doing less and less of.
  (Mr Elliott) I wonder if I could just add something. If we look at key areas, performance indicators actually drive the style of policing in a way that possibly the public do not want. We have become very good at answering the telephone, because we were told that was a target we had to meet. We are extremely good at getting people to key calls, but what we should be doing is looking behind those statistics. What we have behind those statistics is a volume of work that does not get done in the way the public want. So we have people answering the phone, which is targeted, and we have people dispatching people, and in between we have somebody that filters those things now, because we get so many calls we cannot handle the calls. Nobody looks at those particular issues. What it has done is we have resourced control rooms and resourced some degree of immediate response, to the detriment of community policing in many areas. I think you have picked an aspect that actually drives the style of policing, because we want to meet the targets. What we have not done is looked behind the targets. Targets really should be a management tool rather than an aim in themselves, and that is what it has become nowadays. In a way, we have started to measure things that can be measured rather than measure satisfaction. Jan is absolutely right. We are doing quantitative rather than qualitative measurement. If you had more qualitative measurement, that would be a plus. Funnily enough, telephone answering is a key area that demonstrates that.

249. I am delighted you draw a distinction between targets as a management tool and an aim in themselves, but they also sometimes, if I can move on a little, have real political significance. There is an argument between the political parties over certain key targets set by government, and this was obvious with the Prime Minister's pledge to get street crime under control by a specific date. Why he gave a specific date is his business, but nevertheless, this probably impacts on the public more. We have had targets like this for health and education, and there has been a lot of political jiggery-pokery going on at high level, which you surely must have a view on at least.
(Mrs Berry) I think it is quite right to focus on particular problems, but you also have to appreciate that we are not just in the business of dealing with burglaries and crime in general, or anti-social behaviour. One of the most important roles of the police is to respond to emergencies, and yet if you look at the National Policing Plan there is not one mention of us responding to an emergency. If you take the example of something which occurred during the summer of this year, the awful murders of those two girls in Soham, from a resource point of view, not only were resources in Cambridgeshire used up, but they were using officers�quite rightly, and this is how policing should operate�from other forces to support and complement the work they were undertaking. But if Cambridgeshire had been part of the Street Crime Initiative, they would not have been able to achieve any targets whatsoever, because their resources were dealing with one incident, which in reality would be one crime statistic. I am not saying they should not do that; they should be doing that, but it just shows how one figure can take up an awful lot of resources. If you go straight on to the quantitative figures, you could arrest and bring to justice 100 people for stealing a Mars bar, and the statistics would look very impressive, but the quality of those statistics and whether you needed to arrest them and whether they needed to be dealt with in that way would be extremely questionable from a public perspective as well.

250. I think that is the big question. The Chairman originally asked how targets work, and there are always perverse effects of targets. Is the increased obsession with targets nationally, and force by force, improving policing generally, or is it causing too much paperwork?
(Mrs Berry) It is probably a cop-out to say I think it is too early to say, because I do not think we are as sophisticated in target-setting and analysis of statistical data as maybe teaching is and other organisations are. I think it is very early days for the police. We said for years that you cannot judge policing by statistics, and we pulled away from it. Now we are being dragged into it, and we have a fair amount of catching up to do. It is terribly important to balance quantity with quality, otherwise you will have this imbalance where the statistics really do not mean anything at all.

Chairman

251. When the Committee visited the North-East last year, we met various people, including senior police officers, and I remember one of them saying to the Committee that he now had more PIs than PCs.
(Mrs Berry) That is probably true!

Annette Brooke

252. If I could start with one or two education questions, obviously the NUT position is that they do not want statistics published in tables, but an acceptance that the data is necessary. I suppose it then becomes a question of how you handle that data and how you interpret it. I really wanted to ask a question about time lags in relation to this, because yesterday David Bell said that he needed a critical review of literacy and numeracy, or reading and writing strategy, because the English tests were static in their results for three years, but there are lots of initiatives going on. There is a lot of investment for example in pre-school which will not have even had time to work through. So how, when we are having some evaluation of this, are we actually taking on board that things are happening at different levels, there will be time lags, and when is the point to kick in to say that is not working and go on to something else? How does the NUT react to that?
(Mr Bangs) That is a good question. I am a great fan of David Bell. He used to be the Chief Education Officer for Newcastle, and when we published our report on school self-evaluation by Strathclyde University, he was the first Chief Education Officer to gather all teachers together in Newcastle and say, "How can we find out about ourselves and what we are doing well and what we are doing badly?" It was about assessment of what you do in a school, giving it back to teachers and making them responsible for it. So I am a great fan, but I do disagree with the link that the Chief Inspector has made between the need to review the strategies for educational purposes�and I think there is an argument always to review whether or not your strategies are at their most effective�and hitching it to the "failure" to meet the government targets. I just want to say something about the original setting of the 75 per cent and 80 per cent targets for Mathematics and English. At the time in 1997 I asked the Department where they got the information from to set those targets. I have never been able to find any basis of evidence for the Government fixing on those targets and not, for instance, 80 per cent and 90 per cent, or indeed 35 per cent and 40 per cent. I have never been able to detect a rationale behind the setting of those particular targets, an educational rationale, whereas I have always seen an educational rationale for literacy and numeracy strategies. So the link that the Chief Inspector made I would question. I think it is right, however, to always, as a chief inspector, look at whether or not the government is getting the biggest "bang for the buck" to coin a phrase, bearing in mind my own name, from their own literacy and numeracy strategies. But I do think there is a need for a separation of the two, and I do question the Chief Inspector not actually criticising the basis for target-setting.

253. Perhaps I can pursue that a bit more. What I am really trying to tease out here is that we seem to have taken an awful long time to get round to getting value-added. In a sense, though it will be comparable, the value-added goal is going to change because the baseline assessment of children going into school will be at a much higher level. So I am not too sure how the value-added is going to take us in the whole realm of things. It will help. It might help comparing individual schools. What I am really trying to say is everything is changing all the time, and yet the target is something which is fixed, and I think there is a role for the teaching profession to be very positive about this, and say "This is what it should be," actually taking on board some of the things that are happening out there.
(Mr Bangs) I agree with the legislation, which requires school governing bodies in consultation with staff to set targets for individual schools. That is based on the schools' own evaluation of what they think they can achieve, and it should be tested externally. It should be an accountable system whereby an inspectorate or evaluators, whether it is a local education authority or whether it is a national inspectorate, test whether you set the targets right and what basis you actually set those targets on. I am absolutely in favour of that. What I am not in favour of is hitching value-added to a very crude performance table based on a set of results where success and achievement is relative to the other positions of schools on the particular league table scale. You might have done extraordinarily well and, as I said before, be near or at the bottom of the league table. You might have had a very, very difficult cohort of pupils coming through, and you could have shown some value-added. But some of your achievement�and I used to teach in a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties for years�may well be just keeping those young people in school, and the fact that they are at a plateau is a basis for further work, but just keeping them in school and working overtime to secure greater achievement. My problem with targets is that it is linked to school performance tables, hitched to the notion of instant success over a fixed period of time. Schools can be enormously successful but you cannot get predetermined, nationally imposed instant results. That is my problem with that particular approach. What I am in favour of�and I think we are at one with the Police Federation�is qualitative assessment, which involves whole institution inspection, which involves participation and questioning teachers about why they have come to their views about what they think is successful or not, coupled with the idea that local education authorities should have floor targets below which they should not fall. That seems to me reasonable.

  254. Could I ask Jan a brief question? I was on the Committee of the Police Reform Bill. We spent a lot of time talking about standardisation of the tripartite system. What benefit will there be for the public from the National Policing Plan?
  (Mrs Berry) I think the public will see where the Government believe our priorities should be set, and if there are differences of opinion at a local level, then local police chiefs will be able to justify why they are doing one thing as opposed to another. I think it is quite right that the government should set general direction and general strategy, but the benefit of policing in the UK has always been local delivery, and I think that is something that we should dispense with at our peril, to a certain extent. One of the things which John has alluded to is that we have a tendency at this moment in time�and the National Policing Plan does this to an extent�to compartmentalise policing. You can look at it in a very insular and limited way. You can say, "What is happening in burglary? What is happening in street crime? What is happening in drugs?" and ask what is happening in all the different areas, whereas in reality there are ties between all of these areas. So there are ties within policing, and there are also ties between policing and other agencies. Taking drugs as an example, because that is obviously one of the targets with regard to the National Policing Plan, the drug strategy for the UK�another tripartite arrangement�is about education, enforcement and treatment. It is quite right that the police service should be held accountable for levels of crime, but we are not the only people who should be held accountable for levels of crime. If 70 per cent of crime is drug-related, and if 70-80 per cent of offenders who are abusing drugs are leaving the criminal justice system without having received any treatment, we are just re-surfacing the problems for the future, and yet we are then accountable for the crime that they are going to go on to commit. So it is important in setting targets for the police that similar targets are then set for education, with regard to the education element of drugs, and for the Health Service with regard to the treatment side of drugs. Unless you have complementary targets going across the agencies, then real improvements are not going to be made.
  (Mr Elliott) I wonder if I can make a small point about street crime, which I think is worth thinking about, and this point I have made before about looking behind the targets. In the Street Crime Initiative in the majority of forces street crime went down. In some of those forces other crime went down, and in some of those forces other crime went up. The interesting question would be why. If you have a target and you meet the target, that for me is not the end of the question. The question is what happens elsewhere, what is behind the target. Why in some areas did street crime go down and burglary go down and other crime go down, and in some areas other crime stayed the same, and in some areas it went up? Those are interesting questions from behind the targets that we do not answer because we are too busy trying to hit the targets.

Chairman

255. Do you know the answer to that?
(Mr Elliott) No.

Sir Sydney Chapman

256. I get the impression that the NUT is against all targets except, to use your phrase, perhaps floor level targets. But could I put to you that if there were floor level targets, you would probably complain about the level at which they were set. Can I add to that�and I do not want to be destructive�how do you think the targets should be set?
(Mr Bangs) I think they should be set in consultation with local education authorities, and I think local education authorities should be challenged by inspectors. I think local education authorities should be required to consult with schools about what schools think is achievable or not. A good local education authority will test out the claims of schools as the schools will test out the claims of local education authorities. What I do not want to happen�and this has happened with a number of local education authorities, and you will have to ask the Local Government Association, for example, about the nature of this�is when the 2004 targets were set for local education authorities, there was an enormous amount of arm-bending going on by the DfES of individual local education authorities to achieve their particular target to match the new targets set for 2004. It was entirely top down and not bottom up. I understand that one or two authorities have resisted that process, saying, "We are being set arbitrary targets which we do not think we can achieve, but we are completely open to an evaluation of the quality of the education in our schools." That seems to me an entirely legitimate position. We have never come out against public service agreements. We have never been opposed to that, but I do think the government needs to evaluate not only what targets are for, and whether targets are giving government the information it needs about the efficiency of its services compared with the spending; it also needs to ask what effects are targets having on the service itself? I have to agree with Jan, for instance, that when you set a specific narrow target, as Michael Bishard said, it has an effect on behaviours. And I am deeply disturbed about the effect on the curriculum. What Macbeath and Galton found from Cambridge University was that in primary schools not only were certain subjects not being taught in year six, but general creativity in primary schools was going down. Teachers' own sense of creativity was going down, and young people themselves did not feel that they were getting as good a crack at what they thought schooling ought to be about. I can make the report available to the Committee if people would like to see that. It is on our website, but I will get a copy to you. I am in favour of government asking itself what it does need targets for, bearing in mind the need for a thumbnail sketch sometimes for political purposes about how your system is doing, and what effect those targets have on the behaviours of those who are delivering the service.

257. Has the Government ever consulted the NUT before setting targets?
(Mr Bangs) It has consulted with us on the level of the targets. In fact, there is a consultation that happens every year on school performance tables. There are regular consultations and we are part of that consultation loop. What we have never been consulted on is the nature of school performance tables themselves or indeed the particular nature of the targets being set; only on the levels.

  258. This next question is to both of you. Do you report to the Government on what you think are the effects of setting targets? In other words, does the Government have the benefit of your experience after they have set the targets?
  (Mrs Berry) As far as the National Policing Plan is concerned, that was established from a consultative group which included the Police Federation, and certainly at all stages of the draft we were consulted. I would not say that we were always listened to but that is an issue as far as consultation is concerned. But certainly there is a national policing forum which advises the Home Secretary on issues that will go into the National Policing Plan. It is very early days as to what will come out at the other end.
  (Mr Elliott) In terms of targets and performance indicators, I am sitting on a steering group on police reform that is looking at trying to get a wider view of targets. We are trying to get more qualitative factors into that process. So we are being involved in that but, as Jan says, how much note will be taken of it is under question, but we have been consulted and there is a drive to try and get more qualitative analysis into the whole question of performance indicators.
  (Mr Bangs) That is a very good question. We had a conference last summer with the National Campaign for the Arts. It was a conference on getting creativity back into the curriculum. It was an enormously successful conference, and Baroness Blackstone and Estelle Morris, the then Secretary of State, spoke to it. One of Estelle Morris's most frank admissions at that conference, which I think the Times Ed picked up but not many others, was that she could not square the circle of the assessment regime in schools and the need to actually re-invigorate creativity. She could not square the circle. As a frank admission of the problem caused by external evaluation, I could not have had a better picture of it. Just after that conference we published two reports: John Macbeath's and Maurice Galton's view of what is happening in primary schools, particularly in relation to testing and target-setting, and a Warwick University evaluation of the impact of tests in primary and secondary schools. I have not referred to that but the conclusions are more or less the same in terms of skewing what goes on in schools. We have had two very useful meetings with the Department about the impact of both of those reports, both from the School Work Force Unit and also from the Curriculum side. We have delivered the information; now we are interested in finding out what will happen at the other side.

Mr Prentice

259. Can I just follow on this line about the consultation that happens between the government and both organisations? Taking the NUT first, why is it that, when you have civil servants from the Department approach you and you gave your views, your views were just comprehensively ignored?
(Mr Bangs) That is a very good question. I think this is a government that is totally committed to a well-funded public service. This is from our outside reading; you probably get a much better picture than we do being Members of Parliament, but from our reading, it is the Treasury that needs to determine how to operate, and I think it has very clear ideas about how you determine success and failure, and it may be�and I think it is a very good point that one of you made�I cannot remember who it was�that actually we ought to be addressing more than just the DfES; we ought to be addressing government as a whole in terms of its target-setting regime, and not just concentrate on the general strategies adopted by the delivery unit, for example.

260. Are the civil servants not just going through the motions? You are being regarded just as a producer interest: "We have got to consult the NUT, we know what they are going to say, we will discount it," so this consultation really gives you very little chance of influencing the Government.
(Mr Bangs) I think there are two answers to that question. First of all, civil servants do not always go through the motions; they do genuinely want information on those areas where there is not a policy fix, basically. If it is set and predetermined�and target-setting is�they are going through the motions, I agree, but in some areas they are not.

261. Can I focus on the area of truancy? I raised it with Jeremy Beecham from the LGA last week. The Government has told LEAs that they have got to reduce school truancy by 10 per cent by 2004. Where did that 10 per cent figure come from? Was it plucked out of the air? When the departmental officials discussed this whole question of absence from school and truancy with you, what did you say in terms of whether that figure was remotely achievable or not?
(Mr Bangs) First of all, I do not know where the Government gets the evidential base for its crude percentages. I agree with the implication of your question about where it gets it from. I do not know. In fact, there is in interesting discourse going on with government about truancy and exclusion targets. I think the Government is in the middle of a re-evaluation of its own attitude towards the issues of pupil behaviour as expressed by truancy as well. I do not think it is down the end of the route that it has set itself, and I think it is beginning to understand that unless schools actually get the support they need, both in terms of truancy and in terms of pupil behaviour, then their own standards agenda is actually going to be affected. I do not agree with the truancy targets.

262. Should there be a truancy target at all? Yes or no?
(Mr Bangs) I think individual schools should set their own truancy targets. I do not think there should be a national target.

263. Can I move on to the police now, because again on this point about consultation, I was interested in what you had to say about the Federation being consulted over the draft National Policing Plan, and yet you told us just a few moments ago in the chapter on resources and so on there was no recognition of the impact that a major incident could have on the resources of the police force locally. Surely you would have drawn that to the attention of Home Office officials when you were given a copy of the draft plan.
(Mrs Berry) Yes, I did.

264. Yet it did not appear in the final version.
(Mrs Berry) No, it did not.

265. Did you get back to the Department?
(Mrs Berry) Yes.

266. What did they say?
(Mrs Berry) "It is very difficult to count it."

267. So if it is difficult to count, it does not get a mention?
(Mrs Berry) What you say is absolutely right. My fear with the performance culture is what cannot be counted, or what cannot be counted easily, will be discounted. It is very difficult. There are a number of different aspects of policing which will not appear in the statistics anywhere, and these are qualitative assessments. The time you might spend with an elderly person whose house has been broken into will be one statistic, but the quality of that interface is so vital to policing.

268. This is to follow Annette's question: do we need a National Policing Plan?
(Mrs Berry) I think with limited resources and increasing demand, it is right that a general strategic direction should be set, but it is still down to this balance, this tripartite balance that Annette was talking about earlier, that you have actually got to keep in balance. It has got to be flexible to take account of local needs and local differences. I agree with the point that John made earlier on: if you do not have a National Policing Plan that is flexible, then you stifle creativity, you actually stifle different ways of doing things, different initiatives to crime reduction, to divert young people away from drugs or crime or whatever. So if you have a National Policing Plan that is so rigid that you do not allow local problems to be taken into account, or you discourage creativity, then you have a very stagnant policing procedure.

269. Do police authorities do a good job in driving up the standards of their own police forces?
(Mrs Berry) I suspect that that is probably patchy. I do not think I am well sighted on the abilities of all police authorities around the country.

270. Is it not the job of the police authorities, just like it is the job of the fire authorities�and I do not want to be drawn into that�to keep an eye on what the Chief Constable is doing and to drive up standards and catch the robbers and the muggers, and make sure that the police force is firing on all cylinders?
(Mrs Berry) Absolutely right. I think the police authorities' job is very much an auditing and monitoring job and to a certain extent the National Policing Plan�and they obviously have got to produce a business plan for their own force area and that will need to take account of what the needs locally are. The police authority will need to audit and monitor that. There is a subtle difference between them being involved in operational policing, which is where the chief officer is responsible, but as far as accountability for performance is concerned, and auditing and monitoring what the Police Service is doing in a local area, that is definitely the job of the police authorities.

271. I ask this question because I have been reading the National Policing Plan and without quoting great chunks, looking at Annex B on the actions that the chief officers of police authorities should take account of in drawing up the local policing plan, I read this and thought that this is just commonsense stuff and this should be happening anyway�monitoring performance targets, working closely with local partners to ensure that alcohol-related crimes are tackled. This is stuff that should be happening anyway, is it not?
(Mrs Berry) If you take the National Policing Plan to a certain extent what you have is every government announcement for the last 12 to 18 months brought into one document. It is not surprising that a lot of things that are down there as a checklist of what police authorities should be doing are contained in Annex B.

272. Just one final question. If a police force fails to deliver on targets, who should carry the can? Are there ever circumstances when the chief constable should resign?
(Mrs Berry) That depends on why they have not met the targets. As I said right at the very beginning, a target is a target and inevitably a lot of targets will not be met and you have to look at why they are not being met. If they are not being met because the service is not being run professionally or there is unsatisfactory performance in that by a chief officer or whoever, then they should be held to account for that.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

273. Just a couple of short questions, Mr Bangs. Clearly the evidence today is that teachers are under tremendous pressure with league tables, targets, all of that, but should that lead to teachers cheating in terms of test results?
(Mr Bangs) I think that is a very good question. I cannot put my finger on what the bases are of claims about cheating. I think�and all the evidence I receive is�that the amount of illegal test paper opening, for instance, is very small indeed. But as you have settled into the current National Curriculum testing arrangements, it is not necessary to open papers if you want to affect the behaviours. What you have to do, and that is the findings and evidence of our research, is to actually involve children in practising for the tests. What I can say there is that all teachers, this is our evidence from our research, at year six, for example, will look back at previous test papers and there will be a lot of practising for the tests that take place in May. So my view is that there is very little cheating going on but the impact of the tests, linked as they are to the targets, means that teachers will concentrate on teaching to the tests in year six.

274. We might have discussions about the level of cheating that is going on, but if someone is found to be cheating, would it be right to just dismiss them from the service?
(Mr Bangs) That is a very interesting question. The General Teaching Council has been examining the individual cases of that tiny number of headteachers who have been found to be cheating in terms of opening papers. I support the GTC on this, I think the GTC has necessarily taken a pragmatic view of the individual cases. For instance, if the headteacher was under enormous pressure, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and he or she�and it is normally a she�has put in an enormous number of years' service, I think the GTC has taken that into account as well. What I prefer to do is leave it to the General Teaching Council to evaluate the individual circumstances of people involved in that.

Chairman

275. I do not think John was here when we had David Hart in front of us a few weeks ago�
(Mr Bangs) No, I was not, I would have liked to have been.

276. He was far more robust in his commentary on this than you are being. He accepted the evidence that The Guardian had unearthed about the scale of cheating going on in relation to testing. He was denouncing it as wholly unprofessional behaviour that needed to be sorted. You said it is not going on, it is just at the margins and these people are very stressed.
(Mr Bangs) I do not condone and I denounce cheating in the tests. I hoped I had said that and I am sorry if it was not clear. I think cheating in the tests does not do anyone any good at all and it certainly means that for that teacher concerned if they are caught it is the end of their professional career, and should be. I hope that is clear. What I was trying to describe, because I was trying to answer a question about should we have a common position about dismissal right the way across the piece, was that the General Teaching Council and those involved in the investigating and examination committees have had an enormous amount of training and they are now setting up themselves a set of criteria about how to evaluate individual cases and I would prefer to rely on their judgment rather than have a snap judgment about everyone being dismissed. That is all I was saying.

Chairman: Thank you for that clarification.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

277. Classroom assistants are an enormous help and would be a great benefit I am sure to them, so why do we have this reluctance on the question of classroom assistants?
(Mr Bangs) Chair, have we got another hour?

Chairman

278. No, if you could give just a very brief snapshot answer.
(Mr Bangs) There is absolutely no reluctance in terms of support for teachers. In fact, we have probably done more research than anyone else into teachers' views about support. Teachers believe that they do need support in the classroom. 40 per cent of teachers have support for literacy and numeracy and value it; 60 per cent do not. We believe that 100 per cent of primary teachers should have support for literacy and numeracy in the classroom from teaching assistants or teacher assistants, as we like to describe it, and also they need support for administration and clerical work as well. Where the pinch point comes is the Government's model for future teaching staff. It says that if you are going to get guaranteed marking and preparation time for primary schools, we have not got enough teachers to allow that to take place, therefore we need high-level teaching assistants or cover assistants to allow that marking and preparation time. Our response to that is there have been so many teachers driven out of the profession by excessive workloads in the last few years that the whole purpose of remodelling and reform must be to attract those teachers back into the classroom and, additionally, to enable the workload pressures to be placed on teachers. We do not believe there is a need neither do we believe that there should be a blurring between the roles of teachers and high-level teaching assistants. It is a small part of the government's reform agenda. It is one where we are engaged in a very, very fierce debate with government but there is a lot of consensus on the rest.

  279. Can I turn to a parallel question on the police force. Are there any areas where we think we can bring civilian staff in to free up officers to get on with the work and problems you have described this morning?
  (Mrs Berry) I think there are. I think the Police Service has moved a fair way in that direction with the police civilianisation programme. It has downsized in other areas, I have to say, but there are a lot of administrative positions behind the scenes in the police stations, in custody areas which support staff are coming into and are being very effective in. There are police forces where officers who are retiring from the service are retained or re-employed as statement takers using the skills that they have gained whilst they have been police officers. So there are a number of areas where support staff are extremely useful. The one area where we do not believe that support staff should be used is in the area of community support officers. We believe that the job of the professional police officer in patrol is for a fully trained police officer. We believe that the most difficult part of policing is patrol. You can train people, you can equip them in a number of different ways to do the specialist areas of policing but when it comes to dealing with reactive policing�emergency situations�we tend to have our least experienced officers doing the most risky part of our job, and that is something which I think over a period of time we have to address. But we have now got a situation where the least trained people are going to be dealing and interfacing with the public in what we argue to be the most difficult part of policing. I think that is for us a step too far.
  (Mr Elliott) Can I mention one area where I think civilianisation works against targets and that is in terms of reducing ill-health retirements. We would like to see more police officers retained rather than go out in ill-health retirements. What we would like to see happen is that those people who have got skills and abilities which could be used within service but who are not fit for a full range of police duties are redeployed. Many of those jobs are currently done by civilians. As you have more civilians you reduce the potential for that to take place. The government target is to reduce ill-health retirements. Increasing civilianisation works against that in some cases. There are some areas where police officers who are not fit for a full range of police duties would have skills and abilities and experience to offer to the job. Many areas have been civilianised and there is a balance there to be struck between increased civilianisation

280. You mean with continuation of service so they would not be receiving a pension and still filling a civilian job?
(Mr Elliott) No, what I am saying is we would like to see people who are not fit for a full range of duties given a chance, with skills and abilities to give to the service, and redeployed within the service. It is a government aim and our aim and civilianisation works against that if you are not careful. There is a fine balance to be struck here because to retire somebody on ill health costs a lot of money and you lose that experience and ability.

  281. A current question; how do you see this question of non-payment of fines? Do you have a view on that, people just refusing to pay?
  (Mr Elliott) If people are fined they should pay their money. That is the object of the exercise, it is pretty fundamental, and there is no point having a punishment if it is not exacted.
  (Mrs Berry) It is a huge problem with the amount of warrants and very little attention is given to them. Particularly if you are going to have the new fixed penalty notices, if people are not going to pay them then you close down the court system if you start bringing them into court for payment. You have got to have methods of disposal for all these people (in terms of the policing plan) who are brought to justice. There is a variety of different ways people can be brought to justice. Certainly non-payment of fines, which links into the execution of warrants, is a problem in its own right.

282. Because you are tied up in physically having to deal with the execution of warrants and officers to go and deal with that?
(Mrs Berry) The number of warrants that we execute in terms of non-payment of fines is not a key priority for policing, therefore it does not tend to attract attention. The difficulty is�and it is pretty short-term thinking�if you have effective justice and you actually have different means of disposing of offenders, then in the long term you should be reducing crime and reducing anti-social behaviour, reducing road traffic, etcetera, but if you have no means of enforcing the penalties then the long-term benefits will never be gained.

Mr Prentice

283. On this business about ill-health retirements, I was absolutely astonished to learn over the past few days that 70 per cent of firefighters retire early for reasons of ill health. I just wonder what the figure is currently with the police force. I am looking at the National Policing Plan here to get at this point just so it gets on the record. The Government want the retirement target by 2005-06 to be 6.5 ill-health retirements per 1,000 officers. What is it at the moment?
(Mr Elliott) We measure ill-health retirements on the basis of a percentage number of retirements against total retirements. There is a question whether that is a meaningful measure or not. It is currently down to 30 per cent of all retirements whereas five years ago it was 50 per cent of all retirements. Why I say there is a question over whether it is a meaningful measure is because if you attract and retain people in the service and do not retire people per se the figures can be skewed by the total number of retirements against ill-health retirements. We have reduced considerably ill-health retirements and ill-health sickness figures over the last five years.

284. This may be a bit tangential but it is interesting, is it not. If the retirement pay-off, for want of a better word, were changed at all, would that encourage police officers to go back into the service or not? Would it have to be changed at all?
(Mr Elliott) I am not quite sure of your question. We are with government exploring ways to get people to stay in the job when they are not fit for a full range of duties and, secondly, we are exploring with government the opportunity to get people to work beyond 30 years. A lot of people go out on the 30 years retirement and we are keen to attract people to stay beyond 30 years and stay to the upper age limit, which is 55 or 60 depending on your rank. We are very keen to see people retained in service longer. Our view is that the pension scheme was designed to operate over a long period of time and is fair and that including the payment of a commuted lump sum which forms part of the pension entitlement is a quid pro quo. We are exploring the possibility of retaining people not fit for a full range of duties and retaining people beyond 30 year retirement with the government now.

285. My question was not very coherent but you answered what I meant to ask you. One final point, I do not know if it is possible for you to give me the percentage figures but you said just a few moments ago that 50 per cent of retirements were due to reasons of ill health and then it came down to 30 per cent. Is it possible to project that forward to 2005-06 because I do not really understand the 6.5 per 1,000?
(Mr Elliott) Can I be frank, Mr Prentice, and say I am not sure whether I do either.

Chairman

286. Shall we just leave it that it is an interesting question and we are not too sure about the answer.
(Mr Elliott) The point I am making is that ill-health retirements are reducing. We would want them to reduce further if that is possible but always bear in mind that people who are not fit at all for any duty and have nothing to offer and are too ill to go on should be retired on ill-health.

Chairman: It is a good area to ask questions in relation to targets, not least because it gave you the chance to show the conflict between that target and the civilianisation target too. That is a very interesting point to open up for us.

Mr Heyes

  287. I am conscious of the time and although I have got what I think might be a fairly lengthy question it warrants only a very brief answer. I want to test my theory that centrally imposed targets are to some extent a substitute for failure or loss of local democracy and local determination. You have both made a case for more locally set targets, either by the police authority, which was mentioned as having an important role to play, and maybe the LEAs similarly. My perception is that the cynical view is that the police authorities have little or no authority, they are fairly toothless organisations nowadays, and a similar comment could be made about LEAs, that they are relatively disempowered and their legitimacy is watered down. You almost described them as tools of the DfES in one of your earlier answers. The question out of that is if you believe in more locally set targets as a counter-balance to centrally imposed targets, who is going to set those targets? In the case of the police it seems to me that that power resides with the all powerful chief constables and in the case of education it is the headteachers who are now all powerful. Are you not going to give the local target setting power back to the people who are responsible for delivery?
  (Mr Bangs) Very very briefly, I think local education authorities should be restored and have their functions defined. Essentially their functions should be supporting and challenging schools and they should be part of the partnership between themselves and schools. I think that the setting of targets should be conducted by authorities who have got good performance assessment, people working for them, working closely with the schools and working closely with the Government's National Inspection Agency. It is connected with a loss of democracy and a lack of capacity in authority; both democracy and capacity have to be restored.
  (Mrs Berry) I am not sure I share your view of police authorities. I think they are probably more accountable today than they have ever been and also they have more responsibility. The Government have recently announced that they are now going to have responsibility for health and safety. We might not agree with that but that is another issue altogether. I do not necessarily share your view that police authorities are a toothless tiger. The target setting, where target setting is necessary, needs to be undertaken as close to where it is going to be delivered and from people who have a responsibility for delivering the efficiency and effectiveness of policing. That certainly goes down to police authorities. So the importance of policing and the importance of the tripartite arrangement is this balance between the government, the chief officer and the police authority and you need to keep those three angles very much in balance.

Mr Heyes: I will settle for one out of two agreeing with my theory.

Brian White

288. Just one quick question, the import of what you were saying is that targets need to be set at a national level, that there is a management at a different level, ie the LEA and police authority, and then there is a third operational level, and that really what you are saying is that targets are a substitute for good management, and that is a danger of what is happening at the moment?
(Mrs Berry) I think you are right in one respect. Where I would probably differ is that where you have limited resources and you have increasing demand somebody at some stage in the equation, I think probably at three levels, has got to prioritise where you are going to put your effort, where it is more important, and inevitably there will be a difference of opinion as to where that might be.

  289. If meeting your target means that somebody else does not meet their target in another agency, how do you avoid that?
  (Mrs Berry) That again is a position of justification and also accountability both at national and local level. The Police Service cannot operate in isolation from all our other agencies and partners. To be effective we have to work together with these people, we cannot work on our own.
  (Mr Elliott) I think there needs to be some overview so that the agencies that affect policing and social function need to have similar and not conflicting targets in some areas. In some areas in the past there have been conflicting targets which have not worked well for the police and other agencies.

Chairman

  290. In a nutshell the answer to Brian White's question is if you did have a good management system and if you did have effective mechanisms and accountability, preferably at a very local level, you would not need centrally imposed targets, would you?
  (Mrs Berry) We also have national responsibilities and we have local responsibilities and sometimes you have to balance them. Our policing system is arranged on a local basis. We have talked earlier about how Soham were able to get assistance from other police forces to assist them. What we would have if you were solely going on statistical returns is to draw police officers from the rural areas into urban areas and you would diminish your police officers out of those other areas. That is something which I personally would not want to see. You have to balance those two together.
  (Mr Bangs) The government used to have a unit called the Assessment Performance Unit for education. It provided information to government about the effectiveness of the system and whether or not its money was being spent well. I think there is a very strong argument for an independent assessment of performance unit again. I think it would provide much better, fine-grained, detailed information about the performance of the system than a very crude national target setting system based on outcomes linked to very crude performance tables.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

291. Is there a target on special constables?
(Mrs Berry) There has just been one introduced and I am not well-sighted on what that target is. There has been an awful lot of money put into trying to encourage more special constables. The end result of that, and a few million pounds down the line, is we have got less special constables today than we had when we started. It has not been a very successful campaign.

292. Parish wardens?
(Mrs Berry) Parish wardens are local initiatives. They are given different titles and some of those parish wardens�

293. You know what I mean, we will bundle them up as whatever.
(Mrs Berry) Neighbourhood wardens are employed by local authorities as well but they are normally employed. The problem we have is that anything in the voluntary sector seems to be reducing at the moment and we have changed our stance on the special constabulary. It would be true to say that the Police Federation has not been terribly complimentary about them over the years. Our stance has changed and it has changed because an awful lot of effort has been put into professionalising the special constabulary and giving them the skills to do front-line policing.

294. I am interested in what you say about special constables. Is it not a stop-gap for chief constables to put more coppers into areas where he is trying to hit targets? For instance, you made a point about rural areas. The chief constable has got a definite problem, he has got to reduce crime in Bristol so what has he got to do�move officers, which the chief constable is looking at seriously, out of there? What do you replace them with? Are you happy to see more special constables running around rural areas?
(Mrs Berry) I do not think that we are being very successful in employing special constables or getting them to volunteer. What is important is that whoever is being asked to do a particular job in a particular area has the skills to do that job.

295. One of the situations is that street crime has gone down in some places but burglary has gone up so therefore you have got rural crime as the fastest growing of all and to try to get a target in town means you are having to take resources from somewhere else. Do you think the whole thing is about face?
(Mrs Berry) I think policing and crime occurs in different places and it is a point that Clint made earlier on. It certainly happened with the Street Crime Initiative. You can be very, very successful when you are looking at a very small number of targets. If you put all your resources into one target it could be very effective, but there is a whole host of social targets and performance indicators that we need to hit. You need the resources to do that. The Special Constabulary will be a vital part of that which is why we have changed our stance and why we are saying that there should be some form of reward for these people to encourage them to come into the Special Constabulary.

296. How many targets have you got?
(Mrs Berry) At the moment?

297. Yes.
(Mrs Berry) Through the National Policing Plan?

298. I saw you counting them out.
(Mrs Berry) There are 10 indicators.

299. Below that?
(Mrs Berry) Below that there is no figure at this moment because some of them will be set at a force level and some of them will be set at a local level and some of them are so vaguely written in the National Policing Plan�and this is one week old at the moment�so how they will be going into the business plans for forces from April of next year is a matter of discussion at the moment.

300. That leaves the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset a pretty concerned man because he does not know where he is going to end up in a year's time. As the Police Federation are you going to take a pretty proactive line on what you should and should not be trying to achieve?
(Mrs Berry) We are sympathetic to chief officers who are concerned about their ability to meet the targets. We are sympathetic to that. It goes back to the government's job in setting what the strategic direction of the Police Service should be. There may be some things which we have done in the past which we will not be able to do in the future and somebody has got to take responsibility for making that decision. We are and my colleagues are the people who have to meet the public face-to-face. We are the ones who have to deal with their displeasure, back to an earlier question, when they are not getting the service that they want.

301. Okay, you do not like something and you take a very, very robust line as the Federation. What are you going to do about it?
(Mrs Berry) By way of an example.

Chairman: I think he wants you to go and arrest somebody!

Mr Liddell-Grainger

302. Just one last thing on education. You are saying that it is very clear that teachers do not like SATs test, etcetera. How far are you prepared to go in order to make sure teachers do not have to do them? Are you prepared to pull members out?
(Mr Bangs) The survey we conducted through Warwick University showed that 40 per cent1 of our members wanted to boycott the tests but the vast majority of those thought it should only be with other teacher organisations. I think that is an expression of the feeling that what they do is constantly skewed by the test targets and performance tables. We are writing to the other teacher organisations to get their views about those tests. Principally it has been a campaign and a reasoned argument with government as well to try

1 Witness Correction: Over 80 per cent.

and skew us away from the over-assessment that we have at themoment in the current regime. I note, incidentally, that the chair of the Education Select Committee, Barry Sheerman, has also come out and said (since I shared a radio station with him) that he does not see the argument, for example, for key stage one tests. He said that and so did Margaret Morrissey who is also the Secretary of the National Federation of Parent Teachers' Associations. That is shared by the Welsh Assembly where the Welsh Education Secretary Jane Davidson has abolished both school performance tables and key stage one tests. When I hear the government say that is just another country I think what the Government ought to do is evaluate the impact of that. All our information is that it has had no impact at all, no impact on standards. In fact, there is a general feeling that there is a bit of trust going on in the system.

Chairman

303. You do not think proposed actions of this kind confirm the popular impression that the NUT are against things?
(Mr Bangs) No, I do not. We have consistently argued for a national evaluation system of teachers and institutions, which is about, as Jan said, getting qualitative information that you can use and about making people accountable. We have always argued that people should be fairly accountable but not on the basis of very crude tables.

304. Thank you very much. That brings us round to where we started. It is very useful. I am sorry we kept you a bit longer than perhaps we promised. It is extremely useful for us to get different public services together talking about the same kind of thing. It may be unusual to you but it is extremely valuable for us. We are grateful to you for coming along.
(Mr Bangs) Thank you for inviting us.

[top]

LORD BROWNE OF MADINGLEY

THURSDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2002

In the absence of the Chairman, Sir Sydney Chapman was called to the Chair.

Sir Sydney Chapman

305. Lord Browne, welcome to this Committee. Thank you for coming. Can I explain at the outset that I am not unfortunately, for myself, Dr Tony Wright, but Sydney Chapman. I think Dr Wright may have told you that he has fortuitously got an early question to the Secretary of State for Education and Skills and he has put me in his place but as soon as he returns I will hand over to him. First of all, to warm you up, if I may. You were raised to the peerage last year and, if I remember rightly, you made your maiden speech on Kyoto in February.

(Lord Browne of Madingley) Correct.

306. To my knowledge you spoke again in the House of Lords in April. How often are you able to attend the Other Place, as we call it, and how frequently do you think you will be making contributions to it?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I regret that I do not attend enough times. I think it is a very valuable forum, it is a very valuable place to be, but I do not attend as frequently as either I would wish or as I should. I think normally I would say events, since I have a full-time job, seem to get in the way, especially as the world is changing rather quickly at this moment. That does not mean to say that it is always like that and it is one thing that is always on the top of my agenda to do.

307. Thank you, I am very grateful for that. Again, apologies for my voice. In your memorandum, for which many thanks, you begin by saying "It is difficult to judge whether BP's experience of Performance Targets has any direct relevance or application to the public sector. Probably there is some overlap, but only to a limited extent". I think you are probably being rather modest in saying that. What I would very much like to ask you is what do you think the government can learn from the way BP is run?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I have one huge deficit in this area in that I have never worked in the public sector, so I have no direct experience, of course, of what targets really mean to the public sector. I simply observe it as any ordinary person would. I think our experience has been very long in performance targets and performance measurement. There are some things that we have learned, I think, as an organisation that may, with someone who has experience in the public sector, be of relevance to the public sector when interpreted. I simply leave it at that since our direct experience as a company is not in the public sector.

Sir Sydney Chapman: Thank you.

Brian White

308. BP is one of what I would call pretty good managed companies. You have a long history of that. One of the things you say in your report is that targets are not a substitute for good management and should be assessed in the context of a company's own ethos. Do you feel that in the public sector we tend to use targets as a substitute for good management?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I cannot tell. Sometimes they appear to be portrayed as the very essence of the particular public sector activity that is going on. For us I think targets are but one part of the whole tapestry of things you have to do to get people motivated, to aspire to do things, as well as to comply to certain standards. Targets are two things really. They set standards for compliance but they do much more important things as well as they motivate people to aspire to do better. I think what we meant by this was that targets simply taken on their own do not substitute for management. Management is about setting context, about what is the wider frame in which targets exist and then providing the means whereby targets can be fulfilled. It is very difficult�I think it is impossible actually�to ask a manager, she or he, to do something without the resources appropriate to hit the targets which were agreed. The process of setting targets is to discuss with a manager what is the resource requirement as well as the outcome. That is a very important process to give the targets credibility.

309. My background is as a systems analyst and looking at one of the things that many companies went through, they have gone through various fashions in management speak over the years. Is not one of the problems the government has got that they are looking at a management culture which was prevalent five to 10 years ago and not a private sector management culture which is prevalent now?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I think management cultures, if you will, are about learning from past mistakes and also reinforcing things which work well. Given the competitive nature of industry it is necessary to learn very quickly so, you are absolutely right, things keep changing. People do not sit with one way of doing something for a very long time because if you did the chances are you would be competed out of business and, besides, you learn because nobody can get it right first time, you learn about what is right and wrong about a management system. It is about adapting reasonably quickly. There are some enduring things. You can set targets, you can express ways forward, but you must have some enduring principles. In companies these are called values, standards, if you will, which are things which guide the whole firm and they do not change very quickly. The mechanism by which a strategy and plan is implemented does change because it is based on the learning of experience.

310. One of the things which there seems to be with targets is that there seems to be this assumption that if you can reach a target you can reach some sunny upland, you need to go through one more step change to reach it whereas the reality in the business world is one of constant change.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Correct.

311. Is that not one of the problems the government has got, that they do think they can get somewhere by the use of targets?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I will distance myself, Mr White, if I may, and just talk about my own experience and not the government. I think that targets are not an end in themselves. They are used in business as a compass, so which direction you are going in, as the adjunct to motivation, as an expression of the context but they are not the end in themselves. If they are the end in themselves you can get very strange behaviour. You can set a target on one thing and have adverse consequences. It is like the old stories you read in business text books and the newspapers about factories which produce shoes. If you ask a factory to produce a lot of shoes, if you do not say they have to be matched pairs it is quite conceivable you get only left-hand ones. You have to be very careful how you set targets to make them work, very careful.

312. You set targets for production rather than the bottom line of profitability in your company, if I understand rightly. The media decided that was not a good target. Is there not a problem with setting targets even in a business context, and it is even more true in the public sector, that if the media decide that they have got a story they use the targets as a way of beating the company round the head with it?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I will make no comments on the media. I think it is a very good example of how one has to control targets. We actually set a suite of targets but through inadvertent or advertent ways, and it is very difficult to tell, one of them became more important than any other and so was focused on as being, if you will, a litmus test of whether everything else was working. In fact it was one of the minor targets because of the nature of the implications of the financial targets. We set financial targets also at the same time. The lesson learned, I think, was if you want to set targets, they always have to be balanced across activity to make sure they do not get separated. This is very difficult indeed. It is very difficult. I am not sure we have the solution yet.

313. My final question is how do you make sure the people at the operational end of the business are involved in setting the target?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) You cannot set targets unless you involve those people intimately who are going to operate on those targets. You have to go to a level of inquiry of what is possible and you have to go through that inquiry again and again by saying "If I give these resources what would happen? If I reduce resources what would happen?" Then you set targets based on this level of inquiry which are actually owned and felt by the managers who operate on them. If you do not do that then they do not have much credibility, they do not do anything for anybody, they say simply they are targets detached from the reality of what they can do actually.

314. Do your external auditors get involved in the target setting in any way? Are you externally monitored?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) They do not. We have our own internal, as it were, external monitoring systems through both the control function, which has to test the capability of the organisation as to its ability to get at the target, and also audit which is, if you will, the check on internal control processes. These things happen inside the firm and, therefore, we get warning very early that some targets may not be achievable in detail and you have to monitor against them, not only just in a compliance way but you need to understand why people cannot do what they said previously they could do. Something happens in the world, the world is not a predictable place, all sorts of things happen, therefore you have to understand what it is that is really going on against the target and modify your position as time goes on.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

315. Can I follow up the last point, if I may. You are an international company. When you are setting a target overseas do you take in the frailties of the local population? If you have got to face constraints over Mexico, say, obviously you go out and look to deal with a slightly sort of different ethos from what you are used to. How do you incorporate that? Do you just say in the group sector "Right, that is what we are going to do"? Do you discuss it with them and go through the whole thing and then come up with it? Do you try and weather it to the local area that you are working in?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Needless to say, some areas may be better than others, it may be that Mexico is far better than Aberdeen, let us say. One never knows which way round these things are. When you set targets you have to look at three things. Firstly you have to look at the capacity of the organisation you are setting the target for. How well honed is the team? What sort of capability does it have? Does it have all the professional expertise? Secondly, the track record of the team. It is very important to refer back always before you go forward otherwise there is an interruption. There has to be a progress from the past to the future. The third thing is what do the relevant people doing similar things either inside the company or outside the company actually do? This is called bench marking when it goes outside or peer review when it goes inside. That gives you a suite of things which say somewhere in here I can find the right target.

316. In your simplified organisation graph you have the peer review and the bench marking within that, not at all places. Is that because some of these came over a three or four year period? Would you try to go from one financial year to another financial year or over a longer period?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Over a much longer period. Our business is such that what you do in year one you may not see until year seven, so we are very long term. Some of our business is very short term: what happens in a petrol station? But in many cases it is very, very long term decision making.

317. That gives you the chance on review as you go along to boost the team. Let us say you are exploring the Antarctica, you boost the team to go and do that or you boost the team in Mexico because you have a long period. Do you find you can be much more flexible in putting more people and more resources into that to hit that target given you are going over a much longer period?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) You can adjust a lot. Any long term target must have certain intermediate targets. It is very risky to wait to the very end to see what has happened, to put billions of pounds in and say "Well, I will wait and see what happens in seven years". You must have intermediate stages, so that as you look at these intermediate stages you can adjust the capability of the team or, indeed, the expected outcome. It may be quite simply that as you do a project you learn a lot and what you first thought could happen simply cannot so you have to reflect that piece of reality.

318. How does the city view targets? Do they view them as a necessity of business nowadays or do they see it as an add on, an enhancement of value?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Yes.

319. How do they view targets?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I think at the moment the city, if I can make it a bit more international�

320. I am sorry, I am talking about international business, yes.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Financial markets have mixed views about targets. Some investors would say "We do not want targets, what we want to understand is the way in which you portray your strategy, how you execute it and how you control it". That is one camp of people. Another camp of people say "No, we want expectations, we want guidance on what you can earn every quarter". Very, very short term indeed. They are mixed in-between. My own view is that one has to be responsive, obviously, to the owners of the firm, the investors, and I think the body of them at least want some compass. They want to know what are you doing, how is what you are doing different from a similar investment they could make elsewhere. That seems to be the essence of what they want to do. The degree of detail varies according to what sort of investor they are, from the very short term or very close detail, to the longer term, buy and hold investor, if you will, who might be quite happy to look at more general guidance on strategy and execution.

321. When you do the presentations�it does not matter which city it is�to fund managers etc, and you are talking over a long term period, do you try and incorporate in your targets that minutiae level into your presentations? Do you find it that important?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) It depends. We do not have very, very short term targets, we cannot do that and, indeed, it is probably wrong for us, but we do talk about the overall trend of things. When we have a target we talk about it and give a report on how well it is going and what are we doing to get there. If you set a target of some sort then you are obligated to update against that target.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: Interesting.

Mr Hopkins

322. I have got some modest experience of industry and of the public services, education. My experience suggests that in mechanical processes, technology, one can raise productivity by investment, by new techniques but people are very different from processes. One big company I know introduced performance related pay to try to get their staff to work harder. They found productivity fell rather than rose and they abandoned performance related pay. Have you had similar experiences in BP?

(Lord Browne of Madingley) We have performance related pay, we call it variable performance pay. Indeed, it does vary according to performance. A lot of our performance pay is based on how the whole team of BP works. Everyone feels they have a joint stake in the totality of the enterprise, not just what they are doing, because if targets are too closely specified person to person and pay is related to those things it is more likely than not that you begin to pull the company apart rather than bring it together. The challenge always, I think, with a large enterprise is to make sure it is all joined up the whole time. It is always a challenge that people who are very well meaning and who really do want to do a fine job only focus on their job and then forget that they are part of the greater team. Our experience with performance pay is that it is good, it does make people focus on the whole enterprise, it does allow them to see the level of achievement reached with their personal objectives but, again, objective setting and targeting has to be done very, very carefully otherwise the wrong answer comes out for them and for the company. It must be done very, very carefully indeed.

323. I had a three year placement with the Industry and Parliament Trust with a large company and I saw this team approach in action, it does work. Technology imported from Japan in particular where everybody is taken seriously, whatever level they are in the team. That is quite different from putting pressure on individual teachers to get particular results and paying an individual teacher or an individual company. So you are saying provided the team competes rather than the individual then performance related pay is all right.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Our experience is that a team approach is good and everything is connected. If you regard me as the first of employees then everything is related from my pay. Everybody in the company can see with quite a degree of clarity how everybody is�I want to put this loosely�sharing the gain and sharing the pain as a team. I think that is very helpful. What is not helpful in an industrial enterprise is when you set up competition on a very personal basis internally when actually the enterprise has one purpose and people do not invest in parts of the enterprise, they invest in the whole enterprise. You need to speak into that, I think.

324. You are saying simple top down pressure on individuals does not help.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) No.

325. Would you say that has a depressing effect on morale and does not advantage the enterprise?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I think simple pressure would not achieve much. It might well achieve behaviour which is not ethical and that would be very, very damaging indeed. You have to have a discussion with an individual, let us say in charge of the big team, about what it would take to make the targets achievable, which is resources, time or simply resetting the targets. In reality if they cannot be achieved then you have to have a realistic conversation with that person and say "Well, we have to be realistic, it will not work". I think pressure, as you put it, does not work, it just does not work.

326. You think possibly the public services might have something to learn from your experience?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Again, it depends on the relevance of the learning but in our experience pressure does not work and I do not believe we could bring ourselves to do that.

Mr Trend

327. May I say, firstly, Lord Browne, how much I enjoyed the brief you sent to the Committee. Commendably short, very, very clear and clearly you understand the matter of setting the targets in industry as well as anyone can and the difference between that and the government. What I hope to do is try and get you to say something about how government uses targets and might use them better. We do not often have a busy city industrialist sitting in front of us but we had Martin Taylor from WH Smith and he was gloriously broad brush in what he felt the government could and should do. Could I try and tempt you to say how you think the government as a whole approaches the question of targets and in what way it could be improved?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I think I would go as far as this. It seems to me that everybody wants to know something about what is going on around them. How things being provided to them are being improved or not improved and what to expect next year or maybe for 20 years depending on the nature of the activity. So some form of guidance which is fair and balanced�which says to people "Look, this is how things are going"�has to be a very good thing. It is in tune, I think, with modern times. Much as investors perhaps a very long time ago would have been quite happy to say "Carry on, that is fine and do not tell us anything", really I do not think that is the modern approach, people want to know what is going on, what to expect and not to be disappointed, when they are disappointed they do react. I think things which explain what the strategy is, what is going on, which are in tune equally with the organisation that is performing the task is very good because I think it can create reality and it can create confidence, also.

328. Take a specific case, has it been right to publish league tables of schools? We have had a representative of the NUT who doubts that but I should think most parents as part of a package of assessing a school for their children find league tables helpful. Do you have a view?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Again, I had better not comment on government policy but I will talk a bit about league tables. Our experience with league tables has been mixed inside BP. At one stage we did decide to rank order performance of very small units within one of our divisions, the retail division I think. This was interesting to start with. It said to people "I can see where we need to go". Continuous attention on the league table, however, made the league table itself the purpose, not the learning. It is very important, I think, that league tables, or whatever measurement, should be used to improve and to learn rather than be the end in itself. That is what I think we have done. We have converted this into something which is much more akin to learning, which is getting peers to review themselves, and peers I think review themselves better than superiors reviewing subordinates. That creates a sense that everyone is sharing best practice and going forward and learning.

329. I am beginning to feel I am not going to be able to draw you on this. Let me try once more. Do you think there is any way in which governments or perhaps the senior administration of a country could be made to join a sharing of pain/sharing the gain culture so that if certain targets were not met by government a level of public administration might have their pay enhanced or decreased in an appropriate way? Is that something you can do in public service?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) To my knowledge I have never seen it done so, therefore, there must be reasons why it has not been done in the past. It is, of course, a tradition and something which provides incentive in the business and industrial sectors. It is something about aligning promises, commitments, if you will, targets to outcomes much as investors would align themselves to the company. It has a sense that works. Also, I think it is the condition upon which people join business. Whether it is the condition upon which they join public administration or government has to be a question.

330. I will try once more. Do you think there is anything that the government, anyone, could learn further from the way in which you organise your own business, say, and the model of the way you have separated your business? The four main businesses are now fairly coherent bodies and responsible to themselves for most of their business. Is that a good model for government?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I think there may be applications. I do think that some government departments, the DTI, have had discussions on efficiency and organisation which have accessed some of these processes and practices for various studies and, indeed, we have contributed to these departmental inquiries. I think there are some things which can be used. I am reluctant to say because it works in business, by definition it works in government. I do not believe that because everything is dependent upon the circumstances in which it is set. Our targets and our mechanism of managing and governing the firm are very dependent upon what our purpose is and what we do, so a broad extrapolation I think is wrong.

Tony Wright returned to the Chair

Chairman: Could I apologise for my absence. No discourtesy intended. I had to go and harass the government for a few minutes.

Mr Lyons

331. Still on the question of targets. BP talk about targets being challenging but achievable, which I think is very sensible. Will there ever be an occasion when you think someone is not being challenged enough in terms of their prediction and forecast?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Obviously there will be times like that so we have to look at targets�I talk very internally in the company, not necessarily targets we expect externally�to say can we do some things. Firstly, it is very important to set up a code of behaviour which says "Tell the truth. Be ethical about what you do. Whatever you say must have integrity". While you may be making judgments they have to be your best judgments, they are not designed to sandbag, they are not designed to make you feel a hero by always over-achieving or surely over time anyway that will be found out, as it were. The first thing is, I think, the sense that if somebody says something really it is the best they can do. In turn, therefore, the response from you has to be that you understand that, that you are not saying to them "I do not believe you", you say "I believe you". The second thing is to compare it with what they have done in the past. It is only if targets go down, less achievable over time, there surely must be a real explanation for this. Normally one would expect things to be the same or get better in a technologically driven enterprise like ours. Thirdly, go and compare with what other people do internally inside the company, get peers to talk to each other and say "Look, surely have you not thought about something better to do? Is this not the way to do it? Can you not achieve more" and then look at the competitors too, all very big companies and you can get data and compare yourselves with that company. Then you can see whether the target has the two levels. The first is what must be done, so that is the question of how the team itself, the resources of the team, its capability is working, as it were, under normal circumstances and, secondly, the level to which you can aspire, realistic but challenging. If it is to go to the moon then everyone will say "Well, that is fine" but that will not be practical.

332. Is that informally or is there a mechanism for that to happen within these groups?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) A lot of data is collected, highly rigorous data sets are made but data is data. Behaviour, judgment, people and leadership are something else. We rely on very rigorous data analysis but we do not run the company on autopilot, it is not as if you can do the analysis, plug in the numbers and then go away. It does not work like that because it is all about people, it is all about motivation, it is all about getting them to be creative, to look around corners. We start with the rigorous and then we combine it with how best should a business unit leader lead his or her team to something which is extraordinary, always making sure�always making sure�that however a target is specified there is enough room for people to create their own way of getting there. In our experience the more you prescribe in finer and finer detail the less the quality is because people, as human beings, need to have a way of seeing that there is a great way of doing something but it is theirs, it is not someone giving them orders to do it that way. That is where we depart from the rigorous and the detailed data driven through to what can be done actually.

333. You are looking for targets of some achievement, some achievable figure. You must be very suspicious of people who come and say to you "We can guarantee 15, 20, 25 per cent improvement in targets from your previous performance". What parameter would you like to see: 3, 5, 7 per cent improvement?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Really it depends entirely. There are rules of thumb which are situation dependent where you can begin to say "Well, is this credible? Is this really credible?" Sometimes you can get great improvements because there will be a technology leap forward or you are putting so many resources into something the output very much depends on the inputs. Normally you would expect people to consider very carefully in their presentation to you what is the general trend of expected productivity improvement and what are the negatives which go against that. In financial terms you can get great productivity improvements by paying people nothing at all but then they will not do anything and they will not be very happy. You need to balance then productivity growth with wage growth. Managers have to be in a position to give you their consideration of why they are improving or why in a business, as is sometimes the case, they are actually degrading and there have to be very good reasons why, and you may be happy with that.

Mr Prentice

334. How do you keep on top of such a vast organisation? You tell us you have a rigorous reporting system, how do you have a sense of what is happening out there?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Organisations are not one person. The most important thing is to have a team that is aware, understands, has delegated authorities and then can pick and choose the important things, the good balance which has to be looked at either by me or the team as a whole. We operate under a highly delegated mechanism. In BP the process is very simple. There are very rigorous rules, if you will, our internal law which is the way the board of directors delegates to me all and everything needed under certain limitations, very proscribed limitations, to enact the strategy and the plan of the firm. I am obligated as a member of the board to report to them very frequently on what is going on and if something is really exceptional immediately, so I do that. Then I take that general delegation and break it up into specific delegation right across the world and that gives you then the capability of expanding the reach of the firm well. If you do not have delegation in the end it is truly impossible to do.

335. You make it sound very easy.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) It is not.

336. No, I am sure it is not.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Every delegation is not only a set of rules and regulations but is also a matter of discussion, behaviour, understanding and continuous attention.

337. Okay.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Other than for violation of things which must be complied with, so there are the laws of the land wherever we are, there are certain inviolate standards that we have. Our breaches of delegation normally are accompanied not by dismissal and sanction but by learning and understanding because it is almost never wilful, reckless or deeply negligent, it is inadvertent. This is a continuous process of saying to people "Well, actually that one you need to attend to" and a lot of it is self-regulating.

338. I get the impression, you see, you are a colossally well paid business person running a very, very effective company, and I should imagine the people employed by BP are flexible, willing to change and it is not the work environment where there are lots of rigidities. I am just supposing. If something comes down from the top, a small number of targets, then most of the people in the company would do their best to deliver, I assume that is right. I am interested, also, in the management of change because you joined BP 30 years ago.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Correct.

339. You have been in your present position since 1995.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Correct.

340. There were eight layers of management previously and now there are two layers.

(Lord Browne of Madingley) A few more than that.

341. Two or three. Who am I to contradict you? How easy was it for you to strip out these layers of management down to the lean BP we have at the moment?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) The first thing I had were some great predecessors who started the slow journey to begin to change BP. The start is very, very important indeed. I think it was all about how to make the company more flexible, more responsive and more learning. You learned to take the best of whatever anyone had that we could see and then incorporate it and do things better. The world�it is a statement of the obvious, you have heard it again and again�moves very quickly so yesterday's way of doing things may be the wrong way and may simply strand you in an uncompetitive or irrelevant position. It was about understanding the world around us and being flexible and responsive enough to operate in that world without violating some key rigid things called the values of the firm, what we stand for actually. These do not change and they guide the judgment of flexible actions. You cannot be so pragmatic as to completely change everything every day because you are dealing with people and people need something. I know it is only a business but actually people in business want to believe and own something which at least they regard as more important than just making money. They have to have these values which limit whatever you can do, therefore. There are certain things you cannot abide.

342. I am interested in the extent to which you let go and allow the people on the ground to decide important policies. Let me take an example as someone who drives a car. The new BP logo, for example, which we see in petrol forecourts. I should imagine that would have been quite a big decision which you would have been involved in?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) That was a very big decision and it took two years to make.

343. That was your decision, was it?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) In the end, yes. I was involved with a lot of discussions. We had a large number of discussions inside the company, getting the best practice, best ideas from people locally. We wanted to make sure it made sense as much to our manager in Malaysia as it did to our manager in Illinois. We had to find something which made sense that they would be enthusiastic to do something with. As it went on we had eventually two choices, I will not tell you what the other one was because it has been consigned into the wastepaper basket, and eventually we had a big meeting where I concluded that on balance this was the one we were going to go for and then we worked up a plan. It was not something which was done in isolation, it is not an isolated decision. These things, again, are about building a team that is behind everything because it is all very well saying "Go to point A", that sounds like a very easy thing to do but we do actually have to have 100,000 people minimum plus all the contractors we employ. We estimate in the end we have to move half a million people, half a million people to a purpose. That cannot be done just by shouting orders or by making decisions which are free of context, free of explanation or free of deep meaning for people, human meaning. We have a style inside BP, it is the house style, which is quite rational to start with. What is the reason? Why are we doing this? What is the analysis? What are the numbers? Have we really done it? Then we go further and say what does it really mean to us.

344. One final question, I find that absolutely fascinating. Kelvin touched on this perhaps but to what extent would it make a difference in the public sector�whatever organisation we have been looking at�if we brought in people from the private sector and paid them a lot of money and if they did not deliver on the set targets then we would just get rid of them?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) It is a possibility. I think there are several practical things to consider, obviously, because people I do not think, especially if I may say so in the United Kingdom, sign up for jobs just for money. They do not do that, I do not think. I think they have to have a sense that what they are doing is relevant, purposeful, meaningful, respected by others and then, of course, they will make the judgment in the end about do they get rewarded for it but I think there are conditions precedent. The other thing which is important is when people take on jobs�and I see this inside BP�they do want a sense that they control their resources. It is quite important that they have degrees of freedom because in the end if there are no degrees of freedom then you have not employed a real decision maker, you have employed an administrator and they administrate, simply, what is a pre-defined outcome. That is a very different sort of person from a person who says "Give me resources. Give me an objective. Certainly give me lots of rules, very important. Give me the freedom to show you I can get there in a way which makes sense with my team". That is not administration, that is leadership and management.

Annette Brooke

345. If you were asked to advise on improving the delivery of public service, and perhaps you have been, what key areas would you choose to look at, do you think?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Again, I am not qualified to comment on this. I believe that there are so many people involved in this that my voice would make very little difference.

346. I was trying to make that a very general question so you did not have a difficulty.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) In a very general sense I would say it is very important to lead people as well as to measure targets. It is very important to get them really believing that what they are doing is good, that people respect it, that they are given dignity, that they understand in reality the constraints. I do not think most people go around in a world which is detached from reality, I think most people have a real grasp of reality and understand what can and cannot be done and to have everyone in the team focused in this way so that they have a purpose and that they think about the team as one where everyone is contributing to the end product. I think that is important, to think of targets, whatever they are, set within a context of why are these things happening, how do they fit with everything, the purpose of whatever service is being delivered.

347. Targets are definitely there?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Targets only within context. I can explain it more. They are part of something, they are not by themselves. I come back to our own experience. The danger of having a target taken out of context is to create an immediate misunderstanding and failure potentially of what you are trying to do. In our case we had one of our particular targets probably taken out of context. I always say we could have done better to make sure it was not but maybe we could, maybe we could not, I do not know. I can say that we have learnt, and that we will not let it happen again. Context is important, how everything fits together, where the purpose is and why these are important. Treat them as a compass because they will not all be met and do not emphasise one against the other when clearly it creates an adverse outcome or puts the people�worst of all perhaps�who are achieving these targets in a position of moral hazard where they know very well that they could achieve the target but equally they know very well by achieving it they have done the wrong thing. Targets can be achieved but in the wrong way. Do not do that, so therefore make the targets fair and reasonable, make them fair and reasonably balanced and make sure they are owned, most of all, deeply owned by the people who are asked to discharge them. This is very important. You cannot impose targets by fiat.

348. Very quickly taking you up on that, if government sets the target then obviously it has to be negotiated one way or another all the way down, so the ownership is lost in a sense with a centralised target. In BP are there centralised targets which go right down to the individual work force and units?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) They actually come round the other way. For the purposes of ease of understanding some component targets are assembled upwards, not the other way round. We look to see what is possible by an analysis team by team, how capable the team is, what their historical track record has been, how well competitors do, how well similar teams in BP are doing, what they can do with the resources which are given to them and then build a target and then add them up and that gives you then the overall shorthand target for the firm as a whole. That target is immediately owned by the one underneath it. What is very dangerous is if the target at the top is not owned by those who have to do it and, further, they cannot identify their own contribution to the bigger target. Everybody has to own and understand a piece of the greater whole otherwise it is very unclear to them what on earth has happened.

Mr Heyes

349. We have heard in the press recently about the allegations of fairly widespread cheating to produce the right test results in schools, the suggestion being perhaps that education is motivated by fear and a wish to achieve the targets which have been set for them through these tests. The financial press, whilst they have said some really nice things about you, calling you universally admired and talking about consummate skill, were extremely cruel in the things they said about your recent failure to achieve your targets. Speculation included that the pressure on your managers was too intense, that they were afraid to give you numbers which you might not find congenial. I think perhaps you will see that in the parallel of those two cases we might be able to learn something for our Public Services Inquiry. How did you test whether those cruel allegations were true or not? Did you just dismiss them?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) No.

350. How did you test them out?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Firstly I would say I do not believe them to be right and I think the analogies were drawn in the wrong way between different circumstances. But whenever there is at least the slightest concern this is happening, from me or any one of my senior team, then we have to go and test it out. I will tell you why. Because what is very important is people have to understand that to behave with integrity and ethics and fail to meet a target is better than meeting a target and not behaving with integrity and ethics. That has to be the way, absolutely, it is okay to fail, it is good to fail if you have done it in the right way and the only way you can succeed is to do it in the wrong way. The moment you open up that door, you open up the door of moral hazard. Where people have to take a decision which is adverse and wrong compared with their standards of integrity or ethics or the corporate standards for that, their personal standards or professional standards, then you have opened the floodgates for making things impossible. We have gone down to the lowest units in each part of the company and asked them to re-establish their base line and target and we have tested it, we have peer reviewed it, checked it, I have participated personally in a tremendous amount of it, to make sure the information is absolutely pure and is not distorted in any way by trying to put a favourable light on something.

351. Let me press you on it. How did you do that? I accept your assurance that you have done it to your satisfaction. What things did you do to satisfy yourself that people reporting back to you were not the same people being accused of withholding uncongenial information?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) With their agreement. With their agreement, right down to the bottom of the organisation in one go. We went from effectively the top to the bottom with the agreement of the middle to say "Step to one side for the moment, we are going to look to see what is happening". That takes a bit of time to get it set in the right way, I think, otherwise you have some very disenfranchised people but it is an important thing to do once in a while anyway so you can see what the lowest level executive manager is thinking and is doing. You cannot just ask an open ended question, you have to ask a specific question. You have to say "Please tell me what you think you can do based on no improvement from where you are at the moment. Please explain how it fits with your track record. Please explain how it fitted with your last forecast. Please explain whether there was a change in the resources given to your unit. What further resources might you need?" Then after you have gone through all these questions you ask "Are there any other things you would like to say as well?" Then you ask them to sign a piece of paper because it is important they stand there and say "This is my opinion, not anybody else's. I have not been messed around with or pressured, this is what I think". Then you can see with clarity what the issues are, if any, you can assemble again the basis to go forward. You have to do this, I believe, with every organisation anyway once in a while because people are people. There are always slight changes in behaviour and it is always best to go back and reproof, if you will, what it is you are relying upon.

352. The teaching profession say that this kind of external criticism, negative press comments about cheating to get the right results and so on is extremely demotivating. You have been on the receiving end of it recently, how did it affect your motivation?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Not at all. Not at all. I am very clear that in my role as the head of the company I have the responsibility to my team. I have taken the view always that part of the territory I cover is to take the criticism and not to let it affect anyone inside the company. I have a responsibility to do that and I do that and then we carry on and get going and go to where we have to go with a lot of spirit and a lot of energy. That is part of the job, I think. Part of the job is to take the rough and the smooth.

Chairman

353. I could see the financial press and the share price wobbling when you answered that question: "BP boss says he demotivates".
(Lord Browne of Madingley) That is why I answered it twice, just to make sure.

Mr Heyes: I have no BP shares yet.

Chairman

354. Can I just ask you this. It is well known that New Labour folk go weak at the knees when they get in the presence of a successful business person, they think instinctively that somehow these people can tell them how to run things. Have you been asked to advise on how to run government?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) No, I have not.

355. Not at all.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) No. I have not been involved in these task forces. Chairman, I have a full time job. To come back to the answer I gave to Sir Sydney a moment ago, my prime responsibility is as an employee of BP doing all and everything under the board's guidance to get BP to be a great company and to stay that. My time is highly limited and I believe, also, as I have made the point again and again in this Committee, that I am a specialist not a generalist. I am a specialist. I know a lot about BP, I think that is a pretty reasonable thing to say. I am a specialist in business and the issue is for me always saying "But what I know may be completely irrelevant to what anybody else wants to know" and I think that is where I stand saying "I am a specialist and this is what I do for a job".

356. When I see your description of how BP works and this model of having performance contracts that are made in these business units and then the division of those into a number of performance units, all headed by a performance leader, do you not sometimes think "if only I can get my hands on the machinery of government I could soon sort that out"?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) No. Had I wanted to do this I am sure I would have made a career choice some time ago.

357. You have joined the legislature, have you not?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I have indeed. I have just answered this question to Sir Sydney saying that I do not spend enough time there, not because I do not want to but simply events overtake it. I hope, one day, to do that. I think it is a rather different position than the question you have asked.

358. I am almost done but I am interested in your paper to us where you talk about the need to employ targets in what you say is a spirit of humility and then you talk about what the difference may be with the political world where these targets have a different significance and so on. When I had to leave I was in the Chamber and I was hearing calls from the Opposition, or invitations, to an Education Minister to resign if certain targets that had been announced are not met, and we have just had an Education Minister who resigned, at least in part, because targets were not met. Bearing in mind what you said in your paper, does this strike you as daft?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Again, I think generality is probably not helpful. It seems to me that it is all about circumstances and the specifics of circumstances. I think that as the head of any organisation, enterprise, unit, by definition you have a responsibility about that unit or enterprise because you are delegated authorities, from the board in my case, to make things work appropriately. You obviously discuss and agree with your supervisory board, as I do in great detail what it is we do, but the real question, I suppose, is whether you have been reckless and negligent or whether you have been well meaning and overtaken by events.

359. But you said just a moment ago that sometimes it is good to fail. Can you imagine politicians getting up in the House of Commons and saying to the House, "Well, yes, we did not do it but it is good to fail"?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I am sure, Chairman, in modern times it is a very difficult thing to say in what you might call an open debate. As a matter of thinking about what one should do, I do actually think that learning from failure is much more powerful than learning from success, much more vivid. I think if we can almost keep it private and say "that is what we really think privately" rather than take it to a public debate, I do think it is more genuine than learning from success.

360. That is a very nice note to end on. Is there anything that we have not asked you that you feel you could usefully say to us?
(Lord Browne of Madingley) Indeed not.

361. In that case, that is precisely the moment to end. We are extremely glad you have come. We wanted to test some of the discussions we have been having with people from the public services against someone from business who knew what they were talking about and you have performed that role for us admirably. We are very grateful to you for giving your time.
(Lord Browne of Madingley) I am delighted to have been of some help. Thank you very much.

[top]

PROFESSOR TIM BRIGHOUSE, MR DAVID BUTLER, DR GILL MORGAN AND MR MIKE NEWELL

THURSDAY 5 DECEMBER 2002

Chairman

362. May I call the Committee to order and welcome our witnesses this morning? It is very kind of you to come along. It may seem mysterious. What unites people concerned with the health service with schools and with prisons? From our point of view what unites you is that you are all grappling one way and another with a regime of targets and league tables and so on and that is the subject of our inquiry. We are particularly delighted to welcome Professor Tim Brighouse, David Butler, Dr Gill Morgan and Mike Newell to help us with this inquiry and to do it in this cross departmental way. I do not know quite how we are going to do this, but Tim you have a few words to start with and if other people have too, perhaps reasonably briefly, you could get us going.

(Professor Brighouse) Thank you very much. I shall own up to being, I think, the person who introduced the notion of target setting into education. It originated in 1992 when Birmingham City Council decided to have an external inquiry into the state of their education and Professor Ted Wragg from Exeter did the inquiry during 1993 when I was also simultaneously being appointed as Education Officer. The outcome of that report called Aiming Higher, which it might be worth getting a copy of, referred to the fact that if we were going to get some momentum into changing the atmosphere in a heavily industrialised city from "What more can you expect from children with backgrounds like this?" on the one hand in the school and "Just keep your nose clean and there is a job", or by then there was not a job, and "Education never did me any good" in the home, what we needed to do was get some impetus. We believed that the best sort of teachers actually deploy formative assessment. Therefore when a teacher is with a youngster, the youngster has to own their map of learning and would know with the best teacher, what they have to do in order to acquire the next bit of information, develop the next stage of their skill, get closer to conceptual understanding and that a really good teacher shares that map of learning with the youngster. In a sense a youngster in their learning would have targets of where they needed to go to. We thought that if you put those together from the bottom up, you could set targets of expectation and if there was wide ownership of that you might change the climate into believing that education was an important thing. Do not forget I am right back now in 1992-93 when that was not quite regarded as so important as it is now. What we did was to create, to give you a simple illustration, something called a primary guarantee and it had targets of input, targets of experience and targets of output. Targets of input were the City Council committing itself to give real terms increase in money for five years. Secondly we as servicers of the schools would target to improve our own performance in terms of their satisfaction with it. Thirdly, we would have targets to bring in external advisers which were national and international. Then there were targets of experience. Everybody would try to provide some experience. I shall not go through what they were. Then there were targets of outcome and we thought that as a platform around literacy and numeracy, if you do not get that right by the time children go into adolescence then you are in trouble. Therefore there were targets of improvements in terms of literacy, particularly reading at that stage, and numeracy, because you could test them, that was prior to the publication of the results. That is how we created it. The school was set the targets collectively, it took some persuading. We published them bottom up as millennium targets and there are various published articles about that. By 1996 I was receiving visits from the then Permanent Secretary, Sir Michael Bichard, who perhaps was sensing that something might change and that it was possible that I was having some influence over the educational policies which might start to obtain should there be any change of direction. His view was that you would never be able to set targets from the top down, which is an interesting proposition because within one and a half years we were setting targets from the top down. Targets coming from the bottom up have quite a good momentum and they need people to decide what they need to do in order to enable them to meet those targets. If, however, the targets come from the top down, it is very hard to see where you get the information which would make those targets seem real to the people who are deploying them. That is what we have moved to, coupled with accountability. People do not feel an ownership of targets which are too many and are top down. The way we approached targets, people felt an ownership of them.

363. Could we pause there and bring others in? I do not want to lose that starting point if we can for a moment. Tell me in precise terms what a bottom-up target is.
(Professor Brighouse) A bottom-up target in education is when the pupils are working with the teachers and the teachers themselves are saying they achieved this last year with a group of youngsters so they will set themselves a target of achieving rather more with the next group of youngsters coming through. If you collect them up, you would get a target for the whole authority, indeed you could get one for the whole country.

364. This is interesting so I just want to be clear I understand what you are saying. Each individual school sets its own target.
(Professor Brighouse) Yes.

365. Who validates that target in terms of a strategy for the school.
(Professor Brighouse) Dead easy for me: I simply said to the schools that we must improve on our previous best and that was the challenge at that time because people thought that it always had to be like this. That is one of the things you have to tackle in education. When you meet somebody and they say "You know how it is", I say, "No, I don't know how it is. Explain to me why it should be like that, because surely we can achieve more". I invited the schools to set modest targets and ambitious targets. I told them I did not mind where they got to. I told them simply to go for the modest ones and then go for ambitious ones where, if they had a fair wind or brought in extra resources and targeting, they might get there and out of that would come a momentum for improvement and that is the vital thing in education.

366. So if a school does this and it comes up with a target which you think is first of all too modest or insufficiently ambitious . . .
(Professor Brighouse) I would go along and talk to them.

367. Whose target would prevail?
(Professor Brighouse) Frankly, if I imposed a target which they did not own, I would be wasting my time, totally wasting my time. If I could persuade them . . .. I was in some schools yesterday actually doing just that, spending a lot of time trying to persuade people that it did not have to be like that, had they actually looked at so and so, had they seen so and so? You are trying to energise but not simply energise from hoorah, hoorah, but energise by helping them to see other people's practice and when they see other people's practice there is no stopping them. They then want to move forward.

368. Sir Michael Bichard came to give evidence to us a couple of weeks ago and he was really saying that there are too many targets and they need to be wholly outcome targets and not process targets. He also said that he thought the exception to that rule was in relation to literacy and numeracy. Indeed when David Hart came here a few weeks ago to give evidence on the same inquiry, he said that he thought the Big Bang approach to literacy and numeracy was dead right because things were in such a state that unless the centre had moved in in a big way and set these targets for every school in the land, it would not have jacked up the system in a fundamental way. Does that not rather tell against the bottom-up approach?
(Professor Brighouse) All I can simply say is that we pushed our approach and were improving at a rate faster than the national average. I absolutely accept that in the approach I took, there probably would have been 20 to 30 per cent of schools who ignored what we were doing. By the top-down approach, you galvanise those people into doing it. The disadvantage with everything which is top down is that you burn out the energy of the inventive and creative at the top of the range because they simply resent and know very well that those targets are inappropriate for those circumstances and at best you hope that they will be lovingly disobedient, that they will simply go through the motions and carry on doing what they believe to be right.

369. Maybe it is getting the mixture of top down and bottom up which is tricky.
(Professor Brighouse) It could be.

370. Would the others like to come in or indeed say something independently?

(Dr Morgan) I am Gill Morgan. I represent the NHS Confederation which represents about 90 per cent of NHS organisations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. What I talk about comes from every branch of the profession. Our views would be very similar to Professor Brighouse's in that the best targets are the targets which are used by managers at a local level, agreed with staff, to ratchet up and improve their own performance. The reason for that is that in any professional organisation�and the NHS has a large number of professionals�professionals really want to do better. They do not go to work in the morning thinking they are going to do a bad job, they actually go wanting to improve. If you can harness that energy and creativity, you can drive improvement far more rapidly than anything else. Our view is very clear. You have to have some top-down targets; there are political imperatives, particularly for a service like ours where we use a very large amount of public resources. That is perfectly appropriate but that is not where you are going to get the next generation of changes, it is not where you are going to deliver across the myriad of services. That is where you have to harness the local energy. The most effective targets which produce change are because a local community identifies that they are not doing as well as they might. That can be very different. In some places you are not doing very well because it is very hard to do very well. In other places it is very easy to hit any national target because it is just easy to hit any national target because you have an affluent, healthy population. My view is that you do not want those communities and those hospitals to set up a national target and just aim for that because that is fairly easy to achieve and it does not continue to ratchet up and improve the service on a continuous basis. Our view is that you need a small number of top targets; the closer they are to outcome targets the better, the more discretion they leave then for local people to set the measures which are really important for them to measure as they go along to achieve the outcomes they need to achieve for their population. That is then sensitive to the local characteristics of the population they serve. If you look across the country, every place is different. That is not an excuse, but every place is different. Inner city London compared with Devon, where I used to work: they are phenomenally different. You can still aim to achieve improvement, but you might go about it in completely different ways and you might actually engage staff in completely different ways. Top-down targets tend to get into the process and assume that how you do things looks the same in two places, which it does not.

371. Thank you for that. We shall want to come back to some of that shortly. Mike Newell, do you want to come in?
(Mr Newell) Mike Newell, President of the Prison Governors' Association. I represent 1,100 senior managers including the governing governors of all our prisons in England and Wales, except those in the private sector. I would share the views in relation to the mixture between political imperative and the things which have to be pressed upon the service to happen because that is what is required. In some cases there may well have been previous resistance and that is a very good argument that you have to have top-down targets on that basis. We are slightly different in our concerns which are around targets and how they are used. Our concern would be that whilst there is a prison service which is seen at the centre as homogeneous, actually we have 140 establishments ranging from high security prisons to open prisons and everything in between and a funding history which means that all those establishments started from different bases. The way that targets are often put together is an assumption that everybody needs to improve on the same thing at the same time rather than really targeted approach to delivery of performance. In the prison service there is a general feeling that we do not target very well to the actual circumstances surrounding any particular prison at a time.

372. That is very useful. Thank you for that. Mr Butler?
(Mr Butler) Yes, Chairman, and thank you for your welcome. My name is David Butler, I am the Director of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations. We are an umbrella charity for parent teacher associations throughout the country. In our present state we have some 12,500 member associations. We are very pleased to have the opportunity to support the work of the Committee today. We all accept that targets exist and targets are here to stay. They are one way of demonstrating accountability and such accountability is valid, however they are not the whole and therefore their use does need to be addressed cautiously. In terms of a parental perspective on those targets, then we want to see a situation which is useful and assists parents and their children overall with the development of their education. Our concern would be that a plethora of testing and the development of a mountain of national statistics is not necessarily helpful. In the context we are discussing at the moment, our view is that it would be useful and very valid to have centrally set strategic targets but to leave the development of operational targets to a local or regional level.

373. May I just see whether I can get an argument going between you and Professor Brighouse? If you speak for parents, do parents not have a right to see published information about schools, even if teachers do not want to provide it?
(Mr Butler) Yes, absolutely, but let us hope that published information is useful and is accurate. There is concern that sometimes there is a concentration on certain aspects; there is currently a concentration on numeracy and literacy and academic targets generally. What about some of the other issues, some of the humanities, the arts, the drama, the music, which do not always feature in those targets and which may be important to some parents?

374. Let me just see whether I can get the argument going. My reading of Professor Brighouse is, looking at these words you have used about league tables, frustrating, soul destroying, is that not a teacher-centred view of these things, rather different from a parent-centred view of these things?
(Professor Brighouse) The interplay which affects all our lives increasingly is the impact which the media has on the publication of that information. The publication of that information both for parents to know the performance of the school and for schools to know where best to look in terms of finding the practice which used in a very discriminating way would help them improve their practice, obviously the data is crucially important for both those things. Unfortunately where it goes slightly astray and has a counter impact is when the hype�sorry to use such a word�the insistence of the media, actually creates simple, bland headlines�bland is probably not the right word either�very strong headlines which affect the discourse and affect the discourse unhelpfully. I do not know what you do about that. I really do not. In Oxfordshire, where I worked in the late 1970s, we did publish the information but not in league table form and the local papers did not publish it in the league table and everybody found it extremely useful and it was a spur to improvement. Unfortunately by the time we got to the very late 1980s and they were published, they had become a very simplistic thing leading to all sorts of neglect of other aspects of schooling, which you were implying and even cheating. It does lead to abuse.

375. Yes, we explored the cheating issue with some of the other witnesses. You seem to be saying that you are not against publishing things, albeit in league table form, if only the media would behave properly in relation to it and if the data were good data. Is that the line?
(Professor Brighouse) Yes. I do think that anybody who wants to improve needs to know where the leading edge of practice is and that is finding information about schools in comparable circumstances from the schools' point of view, but actually knowing that and going and visiting and improving. Unless that information is readily available, you cannot do it, so the information does need to be available. What we have is a dilemma that there is a competing good here and that good leads through the media to something which is not quite so good.

376. Does value added help to solve this problem?
(Professor Brighouse) Yes, value added could be extremely helpful. Unfortunately the way it is going to be published this year is counter-productive. To give you an illustration, they are going to publish the results of improvements from Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 4. Already schools have depressed their results of Key Stage 3 in order to make sure their improvement at Key Stage 4 is better. Had we waited a couple of years, or in authorities which bother to get their data together, we could have done it from Key Stage 2 so the school could not affect the performance at Key Stage 2. If you shove in socio-economic factors you can know exactly where you are. We knew in Birmingham those schools in four quadrants with the top axis, the vertical axis, being a rate of improvement and the horizontal axis being points per pupil. The group on the low points per pupil and low rate of improvement we called "Not waving but drowning". The ones who were low points per pupil but high rate of improvement we called "Heads above the water". The ones who were in the quadrant with high rates of improvement and high points per pupil were "Walking on water". The ones in the other quadrant were "Treading water". You may laugh about that but it is a very, very, very powerful management tool, because those schools which over a four-year period were perpetually in that quadrant at the bottom, helped us focus attention and them to focus attention on schools in socio-economically similar circumstances who were making the rate of improvement. Without that data you cannot improve.

377. That sounds to me very similar to the terms which are being used in the local government assessment at the moment for local authorities and the star system. No? Tell us why not.
(Dr Morgan) The problem with something like a star system is, if you look at a hospital, a hospital is not an entity, it has a whole range of different departments. What patients and what users want to know is what department they are going to use, whether that is a good department. If you are a pregnant woman you want to know about the quality of maternity services in that particular hospital. What you have when you move to a star system is some very high level indicators which are usually about the measurable. You count them because you can measure them, not for any other reason, then you amalgamate it to a single hospital. It may tell you that hospital is well run, but it does not tell you about which bits of that hospital you would have trust in as a user and which bits you should have concern about. I think the issue is about how you give meaningful information to people so they can make true choices. There is an alternative way of looking at the health service which is being done by a company called Dr Foster, which was at first greatly disliked by the NHS. They started off trying to do exactly the same, trying to come up with an alternative star version, a real star as opposed to any other star. They were about giving information to the public in a commercial way. What they found was that it was too gross a measure to tell people. What they have moved to is beginning to look on the service by service basis about hospitals not trying to give an amalgamation of scores but to give some very meaningful information to patients and about value added. What they try to look at is what you would expect in this hospital if it were performing averagely and whether it does better or worse than that and there are statistical measures in that. If you have a hospital in their scores which comes out well, you know you are getting a better service than you could expect from an average hospital and the hospital is doing something in that service which is over and above what you would get from other places. That seems to me the kernel of what I would want if I were using that service for myself and my family. The problem with star systems when they are released is that you then have communities who believe it means their hospital is bad. They are not bad, they have excellence going on in them, it is just the star system is too diffuse to pick up the clinical excellence which is actually what the health service is about.

378. That is very helpful. So that is an argument for better data and better league tables.
(Dr Morgan) It is an argument for trying to understand what would be useful to the people who use the service. We do not often start at that end of the process.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

379. Dr Bogle said that there were 400 targets in the NHS alone. Are there too many targets and can you give me an example of some bad targets?
(Dr Morgan) Yes, there are too many targets because they divert local attention from what is important locally. I can give you a target which is both good and bad because that is actually the reality. One of the targets we have to collect at the moment is the number of cancer patients who are seen within two weeks. That is a good target because it is very clear, it is very simple to measure, it is from the point the patient sees the GP to the point they are seen in a hospital. The problem is that it takes part of a complex system, because what the patient is actually interested in is not being seen by a consultant, it is the point they have the definitive treatment which is either going to cure them, take the pain away or whatever. By focusing on the two-week wait, which is what the service does, because it responds appropriately to the target, what is actually happening is that you have patients who are going to see a consultant, are told they have a cancer, but then have to wait for the rest of the system to get into gear in terms of the radiotherapy, the oncology. A much more appropriate target would then be something like from the time you see the GP to the time you are treated because that would help managers focus on the whole of the patient process and not a tiny little bit. That is both a good target, because it is measurable, it is clear, it has a time limit to it, and a very bad target because it distorts the way the service works. The people who come out worst are the patients who have a diagnosis but have to wait longer for treatment.

380. Do you think that people are fiddling their targets in the NHS?
(Dr Morgan) You will know that a survey suggested one in 12 managers had fiddled the targets.

381. Do you think?
(Dr Morgan) I think it happens very occasionally. The biggest problem with targets is that we know that if you are collecting information you personally are going to use, information gets to be good. If you are collecting information to go into a black box somewhere else which you never actually, as the person collecting it, see any benefit for, we know that information becomes inaccurate.

382. Do you think it will damage the credibility of the NHS if the people are fiddling targets up to 12 per cent?
(Dr Morgan) I do not believe it is that high.

383. What do you think it is?
(Dr Morgan) Occasional, sporadic.

384. What does that mean, one per trust?
(Dr Morgan) No, no, no. Maybe three or four cases a year nationally, that sort of level. It will happen and it will happen if people are afraid for themselves, for their jobs and organisations like that. It is human behaviour.

Chairman

385. It was the Audit Commission, was it not? Does that mean you do not accept what the Audit Commission found?
(Dr Morgan) No, it was not the Audit Commission. The report which had a numerical figure of managers was done by the BBC and the Institute of Health Care Management. It was a very small survey which had a very small response rate. It would be biased towards people who report that they had a problem, rather than being representative.

Mr Liddell-Grainger

386. There is more money going into the NHS and that is fine.
(Dr Morgan) Yes.

387. Do you think that because targeting is going to become the all-encompassing ideal of government�and that is fine that is a government decision�people are going to be so pressurised, they are going to have to do something about cancer, that if they start slipping they will fiddle the figures? Do you think it is going to become endemic?
(Dr Morgan) I think fiddling is completely unacceptable.

388. That is not the question.
(Dr Morgan) I do not think it happens systematically. It is a very rare event that people systematically fiddle. What they do and what happens is that people game the system, which is subtly different. The reason they do that is if you have a target which is woolly, because a good target has to be really specific and very tight. Take a target like waiting time in A&E on a trolley. When do you start the clock? You have to have a very clear definition from place to place of the point at which you start the clock. What people will do is start at different times, depending on how the organisation works and the systems in place. That is not fiddling the target, it is just playing the target. It is gaming. That is one problem, but the biggest problem is whether the information collected is as accurate as it should be.

389. The reason I am asking you is that if the targets are fiddled people could die. It is unlikely that they are going to in the other three services. The concern is if pressure is brought more and more from central government on this. What I am trying to tease out of you is whether it is going to make it almost too impossible not to. You are right in what you say: when do you start the clock, when do you stop the clock?
(Dr Morgan) You are making an assumption there that the targets are related to whether people have a good outcome in the health service or not.

390. I think I am.
(Dr Morgan) Certainly most clinicians and most managers would argue that most targets do not impact on the quality of patient care and that patients do not die. They may have a worse experience for part of the time but you are not actually fiddling things which damage people. It is not that sort of problem.

391. I am not sure the Ombudsman would agree, but fair enough.
(Professor Brighouse) It seems to me that there are two important factors here. One is: does it bring out people who lack probity. It seems to me that in any walk of life there appear to be people where what they say and what they do and who they are do not match properly. We have seen lots of that in the private sector and we have seen some of it in the public sector. In the sense that if you link target setting to people's personal reward, take Enron as an example, then you have problems and it could well be that by linking pay too closely to targets or the welfare and future of an institution, you have problems. That is number one. The second issue, which we must not lose sight of, is that some of the targets have a perverse impact and that is much more important than the first element, that is you can aim for a particular target and by everybody focusing on that target�the obvious thing is the cut-off point at grades A-C in GCSE for us�that leads people to say they will go at the people on the borderline because we need to get it up, because this is high stakes for us. That leads to them ignoring the needs of other youngsters. Or you set a target such as reducing the number of excluded children and lo and behold suddenly three years later people are suddenly saying they should have revised that to increase the number. Are you with me? There are all sorts of perversities in some of the targets.

Chairman

392. Any more examples of that kind which any of you can furnish, we should be grateful to have.
(Mr Butler) I would extend that point. I understand that the Committee is genuinely concerned about the issue of cheating, and rightly so, but there is also the issue of what I would describe as over-emphasis. In an educational context, are we having a situation which is teaching to test or teaching to learn? I should like to hope that we are teaching to learn.

393. This is distortion not cheating.
(Mr Butler) Absolutely. We have a situation where schools have to go through their Key Stage tests and the SATS tests and there is huge emphasis and huge concentration at that point. Are other things being lost? That is the danger. Related to this is the issue of whether we are creating an excitement which is inappropriate? By this, let me refer to the contest of admissions processes for secondary schools. We have performance tables, we have league tables which parents can look at quite rightly to make an informed choice for their children, but does that choice really exist? Yes, they are allowed to express a parental preference, but the reality of many, many situations is that it is actually Hobson's choice. It is not just in education. If we move over to the health service, we see league tables with examples of what the media would tell us are places we would want to be and places to go if we want to die. Yet how can many, many people actually influence that choice?

  394. Gill, were you going to give us another perverse consequence?
  (Dr Morgan) Give me two seconds and I shall think of another one for you.
  (Mr Newell) I shall give you some problems with targets. When you talk about cheating, some of them are just about inaction. We have a target in relation to safer prisons, which would be about assaults in prisons and would be based on the number of proven adjudications for assaults on prisoners. If you do nothing actively to solve and investigate assaults which take place, then you reduce the level of assaults because we do not actually measure the number of assaults, including violent incidents, within establishments. We have a number of targets like that. What we design the target to do does not in any way match that at the operational level, therefore an operational manager, if they wanted to pursue it properly, as they should do, is actually going to damage himself. The more assaults you solve in your establishment, the more you will be punished by having a higher assault rate. Those sorts of targets just do not make sense and we have a few of those around.

Mr Lyons

395. On the subject of performance indicators, I was looking through a list of our prisons. Is suicide included in the list of performance indicators?
(Mr Newell) No, it is not.

396. Why not?
(Mr Newell) It would be wholly inappropriate to have targets. I would find something immoral�and I think all my colleagues would�about having targets in relation to suicide.

  397. So it is okay if everybody commits suicide because the performance indicators are okay. Is that what you are saying?
  (Mr Newell) Where people commit suicide and the establishments and circumstances in which people commit suicide are all thoroughly investigated to a very high level of consciousness about that as a problem within the service which we are tackling. Targets would not help. In fact targets would be soul-destroying for people.
  (Dr Morgan) It is more complicated than that because the health service has a target to reduce suicides which includes everybody living in a geographical area and it would include prisons in that geographical area. The health service is measured against a target of reducing suicides, particularly in young men.

398. So my local trust should be well down the league with Cornton Vale prison where women commit suicide on a regular basis unfortunately.
(Dr Morgan) Yes.

399. But it is not something for the prison to take up.
(Mr Newell) We would not gain anything from it. It is a high profile area where everybody is aware. The director general of the prison service has made it quite clear that it is his number one priority. A very large number of resources are devoted locally in establishments to delivering that, but despite those efforts suicide takes place and the numbers have gone up this year but equally the prison population and overcrowding issues have contributed to that.

400. What do prison governors have to say about women who are in prison for failing to pay fines?
(Mr Newell) We have a quite clear position: they should not be in prison.

401. They should not be in at all.
(Mr Newell) No.

402. How do you develop that with the government, with the authorities?
(Mr Newell) It is about the purpose of imprisonment, what we are out to achieve in prison, why we are sending people to prison. In many minor, low level crime areas we are likely to cause more damage by sending those people to prison, particularly in relation to women and the family. We need to find better and more appropriate ways of dealing with people who commit the level of crime which is attracting a fine and then resulting in a non-payment process.

403. May I go back to the question of fiddling the figures? A consultant who fiddles something will end up at the BMA. A nurse who fiddles will end up with the UKCC, but nothing happens to managers who fiddle.
(Dr Morgan) If you look at the National Audit Office inquiry about what happens to managers, most of them get sacked. That is the reality because it is quite unacceptable to cheat systematically on the figures. That is not acceptable behaviour. I can let you have the summary which came out from the National Audit Office, where they looked at 10 places since 1996, some significant time. In only two places did the individual stay in post and in both those cases they were very junior people who were not able to manage the system at all. The routine is that people are dismissed. There is now a code of conduct for managers which makes it quite clear that systematically cheating on anything is summary dismissal and I should expect nothing else.

404. How do you give support to the managers in these very poor performing trusts who have their management put out to bid or however it is done?
(Dr Morgan) The NHS is very managed, every tier reports to another tier and there is a fair degree of performance management. I have a view that if the performance management system, which is really based on targets, is not picking up problems before they happen, then it is not doing its business. To spot the people who have their heads below water ought to be the purpose of performance management and to intervene. We have not yet reached that stage in the NHS, where we are able to spot things early and intervene early, so we do tend to have a really knee-jerk reaction when organisations are seen to fail. There are several ways organisations can be supported and there is a very large programme going on through the Modernisation Agency, which is helping organisations do what is really important, which is diagnose their own problems, because that is the strongest thing. It is when you know you are not doing it well and somebody works alongside you to help identify what you are not doing as well and then has access to people in other places who tackle those problems. These are not simple problems. If they were simple they would have been solved. They are often quite complex to solve. The Modernisation Agency helps organisations both diagnose and then puts people into an individual organisation to work on specific programmes. For example, the Modernisation Agency has a very active programme around booked admissions. How do you get away from keeping people waiting on a list where they do not know what is happening to them, to knowing at the point you leave your outpatient appointment when you are coming in to have your treatment. The Modernisation Agency will put people into organisations to work alongside and transfer their skills to the managers who will be doing it in future.

405. Is the present culture and climate conducive to self-criticism in terms of a trust?
(Dr Morgan) There are two answers to that. The present climate is always conducive to self-criticism. What is not conducive is always sharing that self-criticism with others which is different. My hypothesis, and there is lots of research evidence around it, is that the most important thing you ever do to improve is to compare yourself with someone, to use data and to want to improve. Perversely, the anxiety about that information being in the public domain, may stimulate people to improve and do the diagnosis within their own organisations. Organisations themselves are generally very self-critical and look for ways to improve. You have to remember as well that often things which are worst in organisations, where managers and clinicians would want to spend their time, may not be the areas which are actually targeted by national priorities because your own local circumstances will be different from place to place. Sometimes having to deliver the national priorities may detract attention from the things which would make the biggest difference to patients at a local level.

Chairman

406. Just to pick up on the suicide point and complete the circle here, you would think that a prison which had very high suicide rates, on the Brighouse model of bottom-up targets, would want to set a target for itself to reduce its suicide rate, would you not?
(Mr Newell) It does set that target but not in the sense of a KPI and KPT. We are all setting that target. The service has a target. If you looked at my own business plan, the number one priority in that business plan is to reduce suicides and acts of self harm. That is not a target where I am going to have three, I must not have more than three. To me that is quite frightening. That is putting a price on it. I can say I have done well if I have two.

407. Yes, but you would want to be moving in the right direction.
(Mr Newell) Absolutely. Everything which is written in the service does that.

Mr Heyes

408. I have been looking at the common themes between the things you have been saying. Professor Brighouse was saying that frontline people need to feel ownership of a target and Dr Morgan said local level targets agreed with local staff and professionals were what we needed. David Butler talked about a few centrally set strategic targets but that locally set targets was where the emphasis should be. I wonder whether in this common theme maybe what you are saying is really that you should trust us more with professionals at the front end. Professor Brighouse started by talking about the situation in Birmingham 10 years ago characterised by a lack of aspiration and ambition for local children. I would suggest that might have been, at least in part, due to a failing of professionalism over the years. It is a long-winded approach, but the question is: are you not really all just arguing for a return to the discredited approach of the past and saying "Trust us. It'll be okay this time"?
(Professor Brighouse) I do not think the logic of that quite holds up. I am not arguing that there should not be inspection and accountability at all. I am just arguing that bottom-up will bring more energy. If it is all top-down, you will shrivel up people's energy and the stakes are so high that you will increase the likelihood of people behaving improperly and increase the likelihood of the perverse outcomes coming from the targets. I am not saying trust the professionals. That world went a long time ago. I am not arguing that professionals should not be accountable: I believe they should be accountable and I am all for them being accountable. I do not see why you are polarising those two things.

409. Dr Morgan you actually said local targets agreed with local staff and professionals.
(Dr Morgan) Absolutely, because they are the people who have to deliver it. That does not mean they are woolly, weak, lily-livered targets. What you want to capture is aspiration. You have to know where you start, what the best in your class is doing. I have an aphorism: if you think you are doing well you are comparing yourself with the wrong people. That is what the target has to be about. How do I get to be the best I can possibly be compared with comparable organisations? That is relatively easy to do with the type of data we have available and relatively easy to track at a local level. If you capture the hearts and enthusiasm of local doctors, nurses and other professionals to achieve that, you will achieve it, it will be delivered, because it becomes something they want to do because they always want to do better every day. It is not about getting rid of targets altogether, because targets are really useful management tools in ratcheting that up. It is giving people something to aspire to which is genuinely challenging for them. Where I was chief executive of a health authority we could achieve anything you asked us to achieve nationally because we had a relatively affluent, well-off population. Any national target we would achieve without doing anything. That is not good enough because we could do better than that. One of the issues for us was a rate of dental decay in children which was in the worst third when for us it should have been in the top five and it was unacceptable to be in the bottom third. For us our local target was to get the state of the mouths of the children in our area up to the level you would expect for the rest of the population. It meant systematically thinking about how we provided dental care in a different way and we achieved that. That was a very powerful target. We were hitting any national targets you would want us to hit but, because it was local and specific and aspirational, it produced real improvement in people's health outcome.

410. What does Mike Newell say about this?
(Mr Newell) Firstly, if you do not trust your professionals, you are not going to go very far. I hope that the system is not based on having targets and performance data because we do not trust our professionals. There is almost an assumption that before someone else externally thought of some targets managers did not have targets and they just drifted around within an organisation delivering something by accident. We have always had targets and the interesting thing is that we still have our own targets and our own performance data set locally to achieve and deliver. The key is the relationship between those professional managers and the target-setting process and this is balance about making sure that the agenda of what needs to happen for performance improvement in an organisation is driven by professional involvement. If you have it at ministerial and senior civil service and our level end and you do not have a full connection with the professionals then you may end up measuring the wrong things and you may end up with very poor performing prisons, despite all the targets. I can give as an example the issue of Wormwood Scrubs which ended with a number of investigations and convictions for violence. They had KPIs and KPTs. They were focusing on those, but they were not focusing on the right things and there would have been more appropriate targets for that establishment. The relationship which exists between the very top of the organisation and the professionals needs to be the one which drives it.

411. I guess David Butler might have a different take on this because your role really is about the consumer interest rather than the producer interest. My question is that we are seeing the argument for the pre-eminence of the producer interest. Do you agree with your professional colleagues?
(Mr Butler) I am not sure there is quite such the polarity you suggest between the consumer interest and the professional interest. If I can take us back to something which the Chairman implied earlier on, it was that potentially you could have a situation where the parents sit on one side of the classroom and the teachers sit on the other side of the classroom. That is not true. Both have a genuine desire to see that the pupils in their care, whether it be in school or home, achieve their fullest potential. That is what we are aiming for and that is what we should be aiming for. Therefore you have a situation where there are some things which you have to respect and the professional drive to improve things, but what I would like to hope is that we could have a set of targets which energises, because surely the job of management is to energise and to provide the infrastructure which makes people want to do the best they can for the children in their care. It is not quite as polarised as you suggest.

412. I think Mike Newell is on record as saying that one of the failings of the prison service is the failure to recognise the difference between management information and targets.
(Mr Newell) Yes.

413. It sounds an attractive proposition. Do you want to say something more about that?
(Mr Newell) We collect many things which tell us parts of pictures and any manager in any organisation is daily collecting a lot of data to inform decisions and make best decisions. Some of the things we regard as targets are only part of that picture. For example, we have five drug targets as an organisation. In reality those are only pieces of information about planks in the strategy for delivering a reduction in drug use. None of them means anything in itself. Detoxification. I deliver a detoxification programme to a prisoner in custody. What have I actually delivered in the final outcome. It is a piece of management information about that. We have targets where we are only dealing with a very small amount of the picture. There have to be some hard targets which are crucial to the delivery of the organisation, running alongside that, to make any organisation work, is a vast amount of management information which is analysed daily by managers at different levels in the organisation to deliver that business. We certainly have not reached 400 targets and I do not really know how anybody copes with 400 targets. We are running about 50 with about 100 in juvenile establishments. We are going up all the time. Many of the ones which get tagged on are not what I would call real targets. Hard targets such as no category A escapes, those are hard targets, those are clearly core business for an organisation and they are a target. A lot of the other is not.

414. There seems to be some empathy from your colleagues. Is there any more to say on this?
(Dr Morgan) There is massive research evidence that the best information to set targets comes from the management process. As soon as you get away to information which is not being used to manage the business, the less accurate it becomes, the less useful it becomes. Part of the problem with targets is that they are often set centrally by people with no practical experience. A classical target in the NHS would be the percentage of beds which do or do not have a television. It is a meaningless target. You would never manage your business by doing that. What you want to know is whether you have any wards left and you have done it. You would measure to those two things, not to what the percentage is, 61 or 65 per cent. What does that matter? It is a meaningless piece of information although it is statistical and hard. What you want to know is that you have done the task. It is how you get that management information built up and it is your bottom-up sort of approach where the information is absolutely critical.

Chairman

415. One more thing from you. You gave a very attractive description of this best-in-class model which we would all warm to. What I want to know is if we wanted to get from where we are now to there, how would we do it and what would the role of the centre be in bringing that about?
(Dr Morgan) In the NHS, although we are bedevilled with a large number of targets which do distort some of the thinking and if it is a target people do it and if it is not a target it does not happen, we actually have some very good processes being developed to take us there. One of the problems is that you cannot take a whole organisation to best in class because if you take a hospital it may have 7,500 staff, run 30 or 40 different departments and if you took the number of conditions they treat over a year they may treat 5,000 different conditions over the year. It is very difficult to run it in a batch process way and take the whole system and the organisation. The sorts of tools we have sometimes look at the processes. A whole series of tools is being developed by the Modernisation Agency which has looked at how you manage outpatients more effectively than we do at the moment. Actually the people who run most outpatient departments are consultants and we never train consultants how to run outpatient departments, they just pick it up from their predecessor. There is a whole redesign function going in to redesign processes. My favourite example of that was Leicester Royal Infirmary where they looked at how many processes happened to a patient from the time they entered with an ear, nose and throat problem to the time they were treated and there were 84 different interventions with the patient or their notes. They sat down to redesign it and made it five interventions. That sort of thing is happening and is happening in every hospital in the country and we shall have some of this redesign going on today as we speak. That is redesigning the process, which is very managerial. The second issue is how then to get best standards and quality for clinical care. I suppose the leader in that field would be the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the national service frameworks, both of which are defining not targets but defining standards of what you would expect. Some of those standards are baseline standards and every service should provide it, but many of the standards are aspirational. They are about, if we were providing the best service we could possibly provide in the UK today, what would it look like. They are giving a menu of things which local clinicians can then redesign to assess their services to say either this is a good service or it is a bad service. The National Institute and the national service frameworks are for getting into how clinicians know whether the standards they give locally are good. They are not targets, they are standards. It is that sort of approach. If you were going to do anything in the NHS, it is more power to the Modernisation Agency, making sure resources are targeted to the Modernisation Agency and the work they do at a local level, with one important thing: making sure that when you try to modernise or change, and modernisation is the word that we use in the service, we actually invest resources in the people who are asking to change to be the best. We do not ask them to change on top of doing a very busy job but give them some protected time. If you give some protected time to people to think about what they really want to achieve for their patients, that is what inspires them, that is what excites them, because they all want to do a good job for the patient. Rather than for themselves it is about the patient. I think "Steady as she goes" is the right approach.

Mr Prentice

416. Does the government have a target for the prison population? I was reading in my brief that in 1994 there were 41,500 prisoners and now you have to cope with 72,000 six years later. Does the government have a target either for increasing the prison population or decreasing it?
(Mr Newell) It would have helped if it did have a target and therefore there may well have been more accountability on the way in relation to those numbers. The real difficulty with the prison population is that it cannot be capped, accommodation can never match the population so there is always a huge lag. All the decisions which are taken in various parts of the criminal justice system and particularly those at the moment are likely to push up the prison population still further.

417. My real question is: how are the targets negotiated? This is for all the services. To what extent do you say to the man or woman from the Ministry, get real, we just cannot deliver all this target, there are too many imponderables, too many things outside our control? It is that process of negotiation between the centre and what you have to deliver which is interesting, is it not?
(Mr Newell) Yes, it is. The deal is made well in advance in the Public Service Agreement in relation to the spending rounds. Then the situation moves over a period of time, so it does not necessarily match the thinking at the time that was set. That is perhaps me being generous on how it is put together.

418. Yes, you are.
(Mr Newell) I do think that a lot of aspirational targets are set up there and by the time they get down to prisons and particularly in the current climate, they become unworkable. Take for example at the moment issues in relation to drugs, voluntary testing compacts for prisoners. I run a large local prison and in that local prison people turn over so fast with this terrible word "churn" that no sooner do I sign them up to a compact than they have moved somewhere else. You decide whether I am meeting my target for compacts on a particular day. So on a particular day I have 190 and I should have 200. The reality is that in the month I had 320 of them, but they disappeared. A lot of our targets become quite silly in the circumstances which are created.

419. I am interested in hearing more about the silly targets. It seems to me in evidence we have had already in this inquiry that there are some targets which are just plucked out of the air. Professor Brighouse, you will know about the truancy targets for example, this 10 per cent reduction between now and 2004.
(Mr Newell) A five per cent reduction in re-offending shared between ourselves and the probation service would be an example of a silly target. I cannot find on what worldwide evidence that is based. Nobody has achieved that thus far anywhere in the world in the timescale of three years and it does not appear to be backed by any research evidence.

Chairman: John Cleese had the Ministry of Silly Walks. We could have the Ministry of Silly Targets, could we not?

Mr Prentice

420. On the question of truancy targets, that is a classic example, is it not, of a target being plucked out of the air?
(Professor Brighouse) It is a process of negotiation but the fact that we want to try to make sure kids attend school and that somehow or other we might devote more of our energies and more of our ingenuity to make that happen because they are likely to benefit in their life chances seems to me to be something we have to return to day after day after day in the school. Continuing to highlight it and bring the community on board is worth doing. In London the issue of truancy is a really, really big issue and is in any urban area. Take the 10 per cent, we are all assuming that you are going to get worried if you fail to hit every one of these targets and we never approached it that way. We said we would go for aspirational targets to remind ourselves of what we want to do. If we do not hit them, well we had a good go and we worked out whatever way we honourably could get there. If somebody is not going to punish you, that seems to me a whole estimable way of behaving. If you are going to be punished subsequently for missing that target, you are going to say you will not set it.

421. Yes, but a lot of people would say that there is a cultural denigration, that if people do not meet targets, then they have failed in some way. I am looking at today's copy of The Times where it has published primary school league tables. The Minister is condemning weak leadership in too many schools�listen to the words�dragging down the results. Is there just too much denigration of people who are trying to do a half-decent job?
(Professor Brighouse) I believe that is the product of the media and the government, having a huge set of units who dance a complicated pavane with the press which inhabits this city. I believe that is profoundly damaging. I do not believe for one moment that the Minister actually said all that is in there.

422. It is not all in direct quotes.
(Professor Brighouse) You know what I mean. What I am really saying is that of course the name, blame and shame is profoundly damaging to the energy and drive of those who are trying to make a difference in whatever sector they are performing but particularly in the public sector.

423. May I pick up on that and ask Dr Morgan a question? I was looking at the briefing material which the Confederation sent us and it seems to me just reading it that managers in the NHS have had a pretty rough time. If we are talking about a group of people who are systematically denigrated, it is NHS managers.
(Dr Morgan) Thank you.

424. This briefing material quotes the present Secretary of State for Health�all in direct quotes this time�"The problem lies not with doctors, nurses, cleaners or other staff, but the management and organisation of the hospitals". How do you motivate a group like NHS managers if they are constantly reading this stuff from very prominent politicians, that they are useless?
(Dr Morgan) How do you motivate people? You motivate them by saying you trust them�it is part of the trust issue�to work at a local level with your clinicians to achieve things which are right for your community. You give them your trust. You may make them earn it first. It is quite appropriate that there are things you have to demonstrate to earn trust: you have to demonstrate you can be trusted. If you earn it then you will get the space to do things at a local level and achieve things and we will recognise it. You are right, managers are the butt of an awful lot of negative comments, not just from ministers or from the press but also from doctors and people like that. It is really important to try to develop nationally and locally a much better understanding of what the management process is. What management is about�and sometimes this is in conflict with what doctors think�is making sure that every penny spent is spent wisely because a penny wasted is a penny which cannot be spent on another patient. It is not a penny to go into some wonderful slush fund which managers have, it is about treating more patients. It is a utilitarian perspective: the greater good for the greater whole. Clinicians on the other hand often think about the individual patient in front of them and sometimes there is conflict between what is right for one individual and what is right for the greater good and society. That is the area where managers work. What is interesting and I think really important is that we call ourselves the voice of NHS management. It is not about managers. To be effective management has to be something which really engages people who are professional managers, but has to engage clinicians, has to link in with the greater society as well and has to be more than just managers doing it to other people. It is about how an organisation does it to itself and sets its own aspirational goals. As soon as managers work in that sort of environment they are very enthused, they work in the NHS because they are as passionately committed to patient care as any other professional. It is capturing that which seems to me to be the issue. It is not just managers who feel put upon; at the moment it is the whole of the NHS. You will have read the things about clinicians and doctors. Everybody feels under the same sort of set of constraints.

425. You are in favour of foundation hospitals, are you not?
(Dr Morgan) Our stance on foundation hospitals is that we are in favour of foundation hospitals, but our press release said not far enough, not fast enough. The bigger gain here is by having a deregulation, being very clear what you have to achieve in the area but deregulating the many not the few. Our view about foundations is not far enough and not fast enough.

Annette Brooke

426. Could we return to the re-offending statistic? I hope you are going to be able to help me with some Parliamentary Questions actually. Whenever I try to get questions in trying to find out which prisons, what programmes, are actually effective, I always get the answer back that the data is not collected centrally. When you have a target over the whole country or over England and Wales of 5 per cent re-offending, how do you feed into that figure?
(Mr Newell) The way it is broken down is that the prison service will then deliver a whole series of things which it is believed will contribute to that. So we deliver so many thousand carrots, which is the term in relation to the drug interventions. We will deliver so many thousand candidates through offending behaviour programmes, those may be sex offender treatment programmes, cognitive skills programmes and management.

427. Are they evaluated?
(Mr Newell) Yes, they are evaluated. There is a mixture of research about those because most of our programmes have been imported from Canada and adapted for here. The follow-up work on sex offender treatment programmes is very good and does show pretty good results. The work on cognitive skills and the reduction in offending was less than convincing in the last Home Office research I saw. It is open to more interpretation. At local level in each establishment we shall have a target to deliver 60, 100 people through programmes, whatever it might be and some carrots. Those are evaluated for standards. There is a quality rating put on delivery of those programmes to make sure they have been delivered to the standard which should deliver the effectiveness and the effective reduction in offending. The probation service have a similar range of things for which it has to make progress. The difficulty is that this is really pure aspiration. We just hope in a few years' time that when we add all this together, it produces a reduction in re-offending. Indications would say that getting people into employment, getting people into accommodation, getting stability in the community on release for offenders is more likely to affect re-offending than the programmes we put them through. We have that target and it is not wrong. The comment was made about aspirational targets being ambitious. We just want to reduce re-offending. We must be very careful to make sure that we do not believe our own publicity, that if we do all these things we may deliver all those things, we may meet all those local targets and we may not affect re-offending one jot.

428. I do not understand how at a more localised level you can get some ownership of the big target. The big target which everybody wants, to reduce re-offending, particularly on the short-term prisoners who are going in and out and all over the place.
(Mr Newell) You do not have ownership of that large target. I honestly do not think that at a local level my staff are interested in that target. What they are interested in is reducing offending and working with prisoners in solving problems. They will get people into accommodation, they will get people jobs, they will put them through programmes, they will improve and perhaps help them onto a path to put drugs behind them and then see those as delivering all very important things. The fact that the contribution to re-offending may be that we do reduce re-offending is something beyond them and should be beyond them. This is the problem of marrying up the central and local targets.

Chairman

  429. Do you want to come in Dr Morgan?
  (Dr Morgan) Probably not on this issue directly, but it is related.
  (Professor Brighouse) The more you think about it, the more that is the trick. Within the sphere I work in, you know that if you can get teachers really engaged in formative assessment, which is that they are really sharing the targets of where the kid goes next and their practice as teachers is perpetually improving, in the end the targets will take care of themselves. It is the balance of how much you provoke teachers, spur them, inspire them into looking at each other's practice, learning from the latest research, pushing things forward. If I do too much top-down on them, they are bothered. The pressure is actually on the managers. The manager needs to be able to hold this issue and really have the courage to encourage aspirational targets, go public on them and withstand the flack when people are saying they are not delivering. In the end it will be the bottom-up energy which enables you to deliver the targets.
  (Dr Morgan) People will go along with the best targets. With some of the most effective things which have happened in the NHS, for example the introduction of a new class of drug called statins, which you give to patients, it reduces their blood fat and also significantly reduces death rates, setting a target is going with the spirit of what people want to do and to achieve and using a target you may be able to speed it up, make it measurable and explicit at local level. That is a very powerful target because everyone wants to do it. We are now seeing a decline across the country in death rates from heart attacks very rapidly.

Annette Brooke

  430. I am really interested in this. Having followed through there, and perhaps I did want to ask whether you were setting the targets yourself rather than having them imposed for your prison, do you think you could learn from the other disciplines in terms of how you would set your targets?
  (Mr Newell) I think we all learn from each other in this world. When you look at how we are allowed to set our targets, I suppose you would say that at most local establishments what you have is a group which is imposed and then you have the ones which are key to the establishment, which the establishment believes in, which are set locally. Sometimes there will be overlap between the two, sometimes there will not. I am likely to get performance from those who work for me if they have this level of ownership of the target and that is important. They can understand where it comes from and why we are doing it and that it has some match into the establishment's role and ethos. There are targets in relation to resettlement which have been set this last year which are proving very difficult for the service to deliver, not least because some of it takes place one month after the person has been released into the community before you get the credit. We are moving people around at such a rate of knots we do not know where that prisoner was discharged from and who should get the credit and who is going to do the follow-up. We could set a better target locally in relation to resettlement, breaking down some of those components which would mean something and still deliver the same thing, but it would not have been imposed in any practical way from the top, it would have been delivered from the bottom by saying yes, we recognise these are the elements of resettlement, we shall deliver these and we shall agree some reasonable targets. You can do things in different ways.
  (Dr Morgan) Quite a lot of learning goes on through vehicles like the Audit Commission who are looking at the whole of public service and how targets are set. Their documents around an individual service, say health service documents, will often refer to best practice which comes from education and places like that. There is a genuine attempt to look across the whole of the public sector through some of that type of information.
  (Professor Brighouse) One point which we have not covered so far, which I think is important and we were beginning to move towards it when I was leaving Birmingham, is that the most vulnerable people in our society actually require joined-up or inter-disciplinary or multi-agency working. I was beginning to work with the health people and the police and beginning to believe that in my contract should be some of the objectives of the police and health service and in theirs there should be some of mine. That would force us to be interested as people, not letting it slip down the agenda because we have a lot to do, in actually working with each other to deliver, because they are interdependent. You can think of primary care particularly and education having a lot in common where we want to work together.

Chairman

  431. That is a very interesting point and you are right to say we have not touched on it this morning. Is not the conclusion that that is where some central targeting can have a role? If the centre does knock some heads together by giving different organisations targets which require them to work with other organisations, it may produce forms of action which would not have happened otherwise.
  (Professor Brighouse) Yes. Unfortunately the example given by central government in this respect is not the best.
  (Mr Newell) There is a very good example in relation to the prison service and the health service. Giving the responsibilities to the health service for the provision of health care in prisons, increasing the responsibility and the budget from April 2003, has shown a dramatic change in the approach and access to community services for prisoners in custody from that. There is absolutely no doubt. I am hoping the same principle will apply now that DfES have taken over in principle the responsibility for delivery of education within prisons. Those sorts of moves, coupled with things such as the local criminal justice boards now which are coming into operation, which will tie people more into the local area rather than national strategic issues works a lot better and a lot of that is about targeting and responsibilities.
  (Dr Morgan) The more targets you have the less anything is a target. One of the problems is that if you have a lot of targets, you have a hierarchy of targets. It may be explicit, it may be implicit but you end up having a hierarchy. You know some are really important because you will get sacked for those and you know others are targets which it does not really matter if you miss. The problem you have in terms of joint departmental targets is firstly getting agreement at the top, at government level, about what those joint targets should be and then making sure that every department regards those as the top priority. Otherwise you get a target which says it is really important for the health service to develop prison health but you know if you are in a trust that the top target and the target which really matters is waiting lists. That is where all your resources go. It is not that you do not want to deliver that target, but delivering the mainstream target takes priority. There is something about being very selective about what the targets are, trimming them down and perhaps using cross-organisational targets as more important than some of the individual organisational targets.

Chairman: That is all very, very helpful.

Mr Prentice

432. On this particular point, you circulated some additional briefing which we received this morning and my eye was drawn to "Competing targets". We know that there are 400 targets for PCTs, 250 for acute trusts, but you say in your evidence to us that the Department of Health ". . . encourages competitive behaviour between programmes which includes target setting". Then you go on to say, and this is astonishing, "In some cases there has been informal briefing by one part of the Department of Health against others about which are the `real' targets and which can be ignored". That is incredible, is it not, that you have the Department of Health saying these are real targets and the others can be ignored?
(Dr Morgan) You are back to the targets you have with constrained resources. Fewer can be delivered because resources and targets are not matched together. There is no systematic process from bottom up to say how much it costs to achieve this target. What you have at a local level is a vast number of targets, some of which are more important than others. The other issue we have is that when policy has been set, it is often set by civil servants who work in different branches of the department. Quite rightly, if all you do in your work is prison health, it is the most important thing in the world to you to get prison health improved. It is a great success to you as a civil servant to get a target for which the service collects data. I do not know whether you get any performance money, you probably do not, but you get a warm glow that you have done something really good for prison health. The fact is that when it gets out to the service it is very hard to handle, because in the hierarchy it may be a very low. It was Mr Dobson who said that everything is a priority and nothing is a priority. That is the reality.

433. I am sure someone said that before Frank.
(Dr Morgan) He certainly said it in some planning guidance which went out from government to the service about five years ago.

434. I should really be interested in getting the details of which targets can be ignored. It is in your evidence so you must have the details.
(Dr Morgan) It is the other way round. We can tell you which are the really important ones you must deliver and must be sacked on and then you can assume that anything which is not in that category would be less important. It is that way round. That is the way it happens. We have 130 targets. Which ones am I going to be sacked for? I can be sacked for these five. Those therefore immediately take priority quite naturally over the other 100 and whatever.

Chairman

435. Which are the sackable ones?
(Dr Morgan) The ones which are really important are the ones to do with access, they are to do with waiting times. It is quite unacceptable for patients to wait over 18[1] months. That would probably be the most important target. They are to do with the development of some parts of mental health services, to do with crisis intervention teams. Trolley waits, making sure you do not keep people in accident and emergency departments too long and get them onto a ward. They are all admirable targets and produce real, rapid, demonstrable benefits for patients, but they do mean the things which are not in that category receive slightly less attention.

436. You can screw up on all sorts of other things as long as you come through on these.
(Dr Morgan) Indeed and what people do not count in resources�they only count the money which goes in�the most valuable resource you have as a manager, is your time, your leadership and the time and leadership from other people to facilitate change and change takes time. If you are spending all your time on the headlines, you will not be spending on things which might be absolutely critical in your organisation. There is a document which is well worth looking at and it is An Organisation with a Memory written by Sir Liam Donaldson, looking at some of the areas which have failed in the health service where we have had inquiries such as cervical cytology, and on each of those occasions, when you look at it, whilst you can blame individuals, they are systems failures where people have known that things are not quite working but because their time and energy has been on the really important headline targets, there has been no ability to focus and change and improve. This is why we think you have to have real local diagnosis about what matters to you, where you are not meeting the best standards�not targets, standards�to drive the improvement.

437. Very illuminating. Thank you very much.
(Dr Morgan) May I make one point which I do not think has come out yet and that is the difference between targets, which are the things you are set and you have to achieve and they are numerical and data collection. Ian Bogle talks about 400 targets. I do not think there are 400 targets. I think there are closer to 130 targets, but without doubt there are 400 or 500 different data things which are collected routinely. Often people do not distinguish between the targets where you get something measurable and the data collection.

Sir Sydney Chapman

438. Mr Newell, you are President of the Prison Governors' Association as well as governor of Durham prison. You said earlier that the prison service had 50 targets and you were talking about assaults. Can you just outline what targets there are in relation to assaults? You were talking about assault solving. If you could go a little deeper into that I should be grateful.
(Mr Newell) There is one target on assaults which would be a figure, the number of assaults for each particular prison. There would be a reducing figure for the following year. What it is based on is the number of proven adjudications so that you find who the assailant is, you then have sufficient evidence to put them in front of the governor as it was on adjudications, now independent adjudicators, and find the person guilty. If you find the person guilty, then that becomes a proven assault. When you consider that the rate of finding the assailant and going through that process may be, if we are doing well, 40 or 50 per cent, then obviously one of the ways anyone can have a much better target all the time is simply paying no attention to reducing violence within the prison, yet the target is meant to be about reducing violence within prisons.

439. To me there is a difference between assaults and reducing violence. The point I am making is: what is the definition of an assault? Let me tell you where I am coming from. It would be more convenient perhaps for your staff to consider that a prisoner has accidentally brushed into another prisoner rather than thumped him in his ribs. Do you have a definition?
(Mr Newell) We have legal definitions of assault obviously. The problem is that it is a crude measure which was put in at the very start of KPIs and KPTs in the service as some attempt to say something about the safety improvements. It has not moved on since then. It is still extremely crude and we have just lost sight of it. It has lost some meaning in prisons as a measure of safety and that is what happens with a lot of these targets. They start off with great enthusiasm about this meaning something and then people realise that it does not mean what it says, that that target is not contributing and that is when there is a second set of targets. My targets internally are about the research work I do on assaults, where people find dangerous points in the regime, how I then begin to tackle aspects of the regime, whether it be with CCTV, whether it be a different approach to supervision, a different approach to selection, those all become my targets to do with the issue of violence in prison and the assault bit becomes something I have to fill in in relation to forms.

440. May I just put this question to Professor Brighouse and Mr Butler? You will know that school league tables have been abandoned in Northern Ireland and Wales. Is it your personal opinion that this will lead to a decline in standards or a less sharp rise in standards�I always want to be constructive rather than destructive? Or do you think it will not make a blind bit of difference?
(Mr Butler) I would be tempted to say that I suspect it probably will not make a difference. Personally I would prefer that we did not see the total disappearance of league tables. They are informative but the question we have to ask is whether they are properly prepared and whether they give us real information. I am very sorry to hear from Mr Prentice what the Minister said in The Times this morning because we have this issue of success versus vilification. What is going to happen to those people who are now at the base of the league table, those people who have been deemed to fail? What is the effect of demoralisation on those people? When we prepare league tables, what account is taken of the point from which people start? I can remember a conversation a year ago with a headteacher who came out at the bottom of the league tables in a local contest yet, given the children she had in her primary school, the achievements of her staff had been exemplary. No account was taken of the starting point or the fact that she had a very high "churn" rate of the children who attended her school. If we ever saw a situation where they disappeared in England, we now have a level of energy where people want to succeed, teachers genuinely want to do the best for their children, parents want to see the best for their children, so probably it would not make a difference.
(Professor Brighouse) I think it probably would make a difference and if they were totally abandoned and the information were not available to the schools, then I do not believe we would have movement upwards. Where I would want to go, having given myself time to think about it, although of course it has been asked before, is to push, at the secondary level at any rate, collegiate approaches. I would want groups of schools to produce their results for public consumption and be inspected for public consumption and the internal results within the school to be used in order to improve the performance of those schools which are at the moment most at risk. That brings me to a whole other issue which is around secondary education which we have not time to go into and which I believe a parallel Select Committee is looking at. It is my belief that the unfortunate thing in schools is that the level of competition between independent autonomous schools, and they are largely that, is producing a greater distance between those who do well and those who do not do well and sadly it is those who are in the worst position to differentiate, probably poorer, who end up getting the worst deal.

  441. I suppose we have gone through a decade now where schools have become more accountable to parents. I want to look through the other end of the telescope: what about parents being more accountable to teachers? Do you think it would be a good thing�I am only asking for a personal view�if it were a requirement upon parents with a child at a primary school to meet the teacher responsible for their child at least once a term, 15 minutes at least, to discuss the child and how the parents could co-operate in promoting the learning and teaching of the child?
  (Professor Brighouse) First of all it is desirable that should happen and much more than that should happen. You could make it a requirement but probably those parents who at present do not naturally want to do that may be in a position where they would not do that anyway. We use the word "consumer" about parents and I let it pass, but I do not believe parents are consumers, I believe they are partners in education with teachers in the interests of the children. The more that can be encouraged rather than required, the more likely it will be a willing partnership. I have absolutely no doubt that we need to do a lot more in terms of parental involvement, particularly in urban areas. I am not sure a requirement on the parent is the way to go about achieving that.
  (Mr Butler) I would echo that. The key important word here is "partnership". The more we can do to foster the partnership between parents and teachers, between the home and the school, the greater success we will achieve. You also have to take account of the fact that if you were to require parents to meet with teachers, you have to face the fact that we have a very high percentage of working single-parent families and when would you actually achieve the opportunity for that requirement to take place?

442. Dr Morgan, in your opinion should additional funds go to high performing trusts or failing trusts?
(Dr Morgan) It is nice to have an incentive for people to improve, but the issue is the nature of the incentive. You can give incentives to high performing trusts which are not just about cash; there are all sorts of things you can do. It is good to have incentives in your system because that pulls people to change rather than punishes people for not changing and that is tied in with the aspirational view. Without doubt there should also be something around what you do with hospitals which are failing. It may not be money, it may be additional management help and support and time to get off the treadmill and the failure. That may be more appropriate than money sometimes. It has to hinge on a diagnosis of what is wrong in that particular environment rather than a blanket one-size-fits-all. If you looked at the zero star trusts they were quite different in their characteristics. Money would have helped some of them but for others money would not have made a blind bit of difference because the issues were much more cultural and systemic. You have to understand what you are doing rather than a blanket solution.

Mr Hopkins

443. I am interested in this suggestion that measuring and testing in schools should be subjective or bottom-up rather than objective and external. I am making the case rather more extreme than you put it, Professor Brighouse, but I am concerned that if this were taken too far we might get back to the William Tyndale situation in the early 1980s where the headteacher said if half the children who left his school at 11 could read he would be very pleased with that. A subjective judgement of his own good performance. He was sacked and clearly alarm bells started to ring. Do you not think we have to have some external objective testing?
(Professor Brighouse) I thought I said that and explained that you have to start bottom-up because that is where the energy comes from. The more you look at it, the more you need the published data, but I was complaining about the way the media distorted the behaviour and the punishing regime, not that you do not need the data and you do not need it externally. Indeed my answer was about going for collective league tables rather than individual school ones to overcome what clearly has been a perverse outcome and not an intended outcome. What do you do next? Targets should shift according to context, circumstances and the age we are in. We are a long way from returning, thank goodness, to William Tyndale because it reflected a view that teaching made no difference and that was clearly prevalent at the time, encouraged by social research at the time that schools did not make a difference. We have lived through a period in which, thank goodness, we realised that schools do make a profound difference and that teachers make a difference and people are not born with general, inherited and fixed intelligence, but it is a malleable proposition and the job of the teacher is to cut and chip themselves to open the mind and the heart and take kids on.

Chairman

444. What is a collective league table?
(Professor Brighouse) A collective league table would be that I do not mind being punished as Birmingham�well I would not now, would I�in other words an accumulation of performance and publishing that for the public domain. On the whole, what we have in secondary education at any rate, the published league table outcomes have meant that those at the top of the league table, coupled with parental choice, are taking the children of aspirational and supportive parents and those at the bottom are receiving the ones those further up the league table are kicking out. It becomes a vicious circle. What I am arguing for is that if you really want people to understand each other you must not have a secondary schooling system which produces such a range of different sorts of schools with different sorts of populations that those young people during their teenage years do not succeed.

  445. I still do not see what a collective league table would tell parents though. Is it not like saying, let us not produce the premiership of football teams showing where they are, let us say collectively how many goals they scored together during the season. So you would not know how many Westham scored or how many Manchester United scored. It does not help anybody, does it?
  (Mr Butler) May I just answer that question from a parental perspective. Suppose you are in a situation where you decide to move into an area. What would be quite useful would be to know that the education in that area is excellent. That is what we mean by a collective league table. It is back to the point I made earlier. In some situations, some parents do not have the power of choice.
  (Professor Brighouse) This is such a long issue that your other Select Committee have examined and there is a paper you can look at around proposing different forms of secondary education. My belief is that at the age of 11 it is unhelpful to believe that secondary education equals simply belonging to a secondary school. We are much further on than that. It can mean belonging to a secondary school and something else and the best form of something else would be groups of schools which act collegiately and provide the extra, the weekends, the before and after school activities, the supplementary education beyond the school term. The publication of that result as a whole would force schools to support each other rather than compete with each other. At the moment what is happening is that those at the top of the league table are phoning at the weekends in order to pay more money to the best teachers in those lower down to go to those schools at the top of the league table. This is a perverse and unintended outcome, but I am afraid we are getting into a detail which I do not think is �

446. Just so we do not lose it. You would require there to be a genuine local network that people could plug into.
(Professor Brighouse) Yes, I would.

  447. Otherwise there would be no point having a collective league table unless there was a genuine network; similarly with hospitals.
  (Professor Brighouse) No, no.
  (Dr Morgan) We would argue exactly analogously to that. If you look at a hospital, patients do not materialise from thin air in a hospital and then dematerialise. They have a story, they have contact with primary care, GPs, they have contact with the primary care trust, they may need social services. What is more appropriate is what happens to the patient through their entire history and how all of that links together. That tells you whether you get good care. You might have a wonderful hospital but absolutely lousy primary care and social services. So your outcome may be very bad even though the hospital has done well and vice-versa.

Mr Hopkins

448. That leads me onto another question about international comparisons. By international comparisons, according to the OECD league table, of some 32 nations, we do not do too badly in literacy and numeracy. There are some better but many worse. Where we do fall down very badly indeed is in the gulf between the best and the worst. The bottom third and especially the bottom 10 per cent are appalling in their educational standards. Is the government not right to have targets to make sure we improve that bottom third and that bottom 10 per cent?
(Professor Brighouse) Yes. May I put this proposition to you very simply? If you want equity, equality, excellence of provision and success for everyone and you want diversity, do you want to add to diversity to achieve those outcomes independent competing schools or do you want interdependent collaborative schools where the scarce resource is shared, not in a way which would lead to the splitting of schools, because we are way beyond that era, but with the advantages of the learning technology there is a chance to have that. I am arguing first of all that we really need to address the issue you have required and we shall only do it by working collegiately both within schools and between schools. I think there is a different model which we could pursue and it will lead to a beneficial outcome. I am all for international comparisons. This city wants to take its education seriously and some of you may know that I have been asked to look at the totality of schooling for London. How are we going to compare London? What should my targets be? How am I going to be able to make sure that those targets are reached.? The goal for this city should be as an international capital city and it ought to be comparing itself with other international capital cities. At the moment, it is an inward-looking city rather than an outward-looking city. It may suffer from exactly the same problems we described for an insular school. What we really have to do is to find information from other comparable capital cities and try to move ourselves forward by learning from that experience and harnessing the efforts of everybody within the city.

449. I have much sympathy with what you are saying. I am just being provocative and trying to bring out some answers. In comparisons between schools with the same socio-economic background, some pupils do very well, some do very poorly. Is it not the case that testing has done or could bring out the fact that teaching methods, what actually happens in the classroom, are absolutely crucial? Are we not still suffering from a hangover from the child-centred theories of the past which have, in my view, evidently failed?
(Professor Brighouse) There is so much in every question. I would never dare say child centred. Let us call it learner centred. Are we really suggesting that a footballer should not be a football centred soccer player? In all these terms there is terrific ambiguity. We want teachers who notice the difference in every individual learner and adjust their styles with the individual attention needed in order that they achieve. I am for that and I am sure you are for that, but child centred elided suddenly into "We don't bother really. We let the kids do whatever they want", which is absolutely hopeless and nobody would support it. On the whole, the tests are excellent in terms of a summative and informative assessment of where the kids have got to. From the point of view of me as the learner, what I want you to do as a teacher is to understand where I am and enable me to move on and that is formative assessment. If you have too much of summative and informative assessment it gets in the way of formative assessment. It is how you get the balance of that right, because you clearly do need summative and informative assessment, but you must not do it at the price, in other words if the testing regime became the case that we were testing every year and we are in danger of moving in that direction, the teacher might be simply perpetually testing. Testing tells you where your learning has got to, but it does not do anything other than tell you that.

Chairman

  450. One final question. A few answers ago you raised the question of managers, which we have not really explored. I am struck by the fact that when we have had the discussion about targetry and measurement and all the rest of it, we come back to the fact that somebody produces improvements. If you had not arrived in Birmingham, and I speak as somebody who was a parent in Birmingham at the time and knew what a dreadful state the schools were in and you came and re-energised the whole system, re-energised teachers, re-energised parents, everyone, turned it round, if you had not arrived, that would not have happened. There was an intervention of a wholly managerial kind using data, doing the kinds of things you were doing. This is top down, is it not? Now you have been called into London to do the same. Is not the key to much of this, to make sure that we get the kind of managers in the public service who do not need to be browbeaten by this panoply of targets set from the centre, but are doing the kind of improvement strategies that you did and are describing, but which do not exist in sufficient numbers across the board, otherwise we would not have some of the difficulties we do have.
  (Professor Brighouse) I think more exist than people are prepared to concede. I do not start until January in London, but I have already spent quite a lot of time in London. I have already come across some pretty outstanding leadership in schools and I have certainly come across three people who I would say are outstanding education officers and if I spent some time with them, I would be learning from them. What they have not done is be quite as public about what they have done. You know about what I do because I speak a lot, I write a lot and people therefore get to know about it. That element of what I do has been important to Birmingham because it has meant that people have wanted to go to Birmingham, because they have liked what they have heard about or read about. That is one of the functions of management and leadership which people forget and they forget it less in education than elsewhere. The key factor for a teacher in an infant class, for example, is how well that kid is listening, speaking, reading, writing and while they are doing it thinking and learning. Exactly the same thing is required, in addition to other things, by successful managers. How well do they listen, how well do they speak, do they read in order to extend their knowledge of what is happening and, vitally, how well do they write in order to spread the message of what they are up to?
  (Dr Morgan) There is a deeper problem though. If you have a centralist target setting with all the targets coming from the top, the way you then manage that at a local level is by being centralist yourself. What Professor Brighouse described in Birmingham was not about that. It was about a leader who worked at individual school level and energised individual schools to come up with how they would deliver the greater vision. That is quite a different management style from delivering a top-down target. It is about working deep in organisations, energising people, exciting people and sometimes targets take you against the leadership model which would be the most effective in producing continuous improvement.

  451. It was just trying to make sure we did not forget that the actual leadership role in organisations is fundamental. If we were to get that right, then we would not have to worry so much about all the supporting apparatus.
  (Dr Morgan) It is fundamental.
  (Professor Brighouse) Which is why the national college for school leadership in education is a very, very important development. If that comes off, it will grow leadership from the bottom and in the middle and throughout the system. We will have a much better system as a result there, if it comes off. There is every chance that it will come off because people have recognised the issue and are addressing it.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We have had a fascinating discussion across the range and we have certainly learned a lot from it. It may be unusual for you to come together in this way, but it has been extremely beneficial for us. Thank you very much for your time.

1 Witness Correction: 15 months. Back

[top]

MR JAN FILOCHOWSKI, COUNCILLOR JOHN BEES, MR CAREW REYNELL AND MR JONATHAN HARRIS

TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2002

Chairman

452. Could I call the Committee to order as we are now meeting formally and welcome our witnesses. If I have got this right, we have got Jan Filochowski from the Royal United Hospital, Bath; Councillor John Bees from the City Council, thank you very much; and instead of having Helena Thompson we have got Carew Reynell, who I am told is Head of Paid Services, as opposed to being Head of Unpaid Services. We hope we are going to be joined a bit after 3.00 pm by Jonathan Harris, who is Director of Education for Cornwall. He is driving up from Truro to see us so it is not surprising that he is not here at the moment. You will see who we are and there are names showing who we are so we do not need to go round and do all that. We are the Select Committee on Public Administration and we are doing an inquiry into public service targets and associated matters. We have had two extremely interesting days here in Bristol talking to people in public services about this. This is a round-up session at the end. Do any of you want to say anything by way of introduction?

(Councillor Bees) Nothing. Just welcome to Bristol for a start from a politician. Do not buy too many flats here!

  453. We have got through to this point without a flat reference. Let us start then and let me just ask a general question. We are getting the message from many people that the targets regime being set from the centre is somehow oppressive to public services, it is oppressive to people who work in them, we are told it is demoralising, we are told it distorts priorities, and the word "bullying" was even used this morning to describe some of the pressure people inside some of the local health services feel. Do you think this is an accurate or fair characterisation of the way target setting is working?
  (Councillor Bees) Perhaps if I have a go at it first. It seems to me that there would be more of a buy into the targets and the indicators if there were more of a discussion about what they covered and what they should be before they were landed on whatever the organisation is, in my case local authorities. It would help if they did not get changed on an almost annual basis because you are not comparing the same things. If the way that the indicators are calculated is different each year then it is not very helpful for the organisations. It seems to me if we had more discussion about those things, a longer time-scale for the discussion and a more comprehensive suite of indicators so that they did cover, for instance, in local authorities all of the main services rather than being pushed to some of the services, then that would be helpful, but we have got no objection whatsoever to there being indicators. We do get worried about the trend where you get indicators being broken down into nine or ten different subsets. It seems to me that is one of the reasons why people consider them to be oppressive, collecting more and more information and we wonder sometimes whether that is information for information's sake or whether it is aimed at improving public services. But we have got no problem whatsoever about having a regime of targets which can clearly be demonstrated to measure local services and therefore which is good management information for us to change those local services and improve them.
  (Mr Reynell) I want to expand on that slightly. The City Council has had a commitment to performance management for at least a decade and has been setting its own targets for its own services since the early 1990s. The part that targets play within a performance management regime, of capturing in a way that can be communicated across the organisation what the organisation is actually seeking to achieve and then assessing whether that has actually been achieved or not, in view of our history, we have to agree that this is the appropriate way to do things. From our perspective, we do see marked differences between government departments about the way in which targets are set, around the amount of dialogue with the local government community generally, and with individual authorities about the targets that are being set for them, and it takes time and it takes discussion to come up with performance indicators and targets that are useful and the right ones and where there is a degree of buy in locally as well as nationally. One of the differences we would see between government departments is that for those who have been doing it for quite a long time the benefits of that experience become apparent. For some government departments it is a newer form of engagement, certainly with local authorities, and at times that shows.

  454. Before I hand over to colleagues, we are on the eve of publication of the Comprehensive Performance Assessments for local authorities. Which day is it going to happen on?
  (Councillor Bees) Thursday.
  (Mr Reynell) Thursday.

  455. So we really are on the eve. We have been looking at different models of reporting information in different services. Is it believed that the methodology and things that are being measured and reported on under the CPA regime gets it about right or not?
  (Councillor Bees) I do not think it is any surprise, perhaps I should not say where we are going to be, that we are not one of the highest-performing authorities. I think we found it rather difficult to understand why certain services ended up with time factors. Education was four times and social services was four times as well and that brings into the overall score. There did not appear to be too much of a rationale behind that that we could understand. It will be interesting for us. We are obviously in the lower 25 per cent and we are not quite sure that it is a true reflection of the way services are in Bristol but it will certainly be an engine for change in Bristol.
  (Mr Reynell) I think we found different elements of the process helpful to differing degrees. I do not know how much you know about the Comprehensive Performance Assessment process that the Audit Commission has been undertaking for all 150 or so principal local authorities in the country, but it includes a detailed corporate assessment undertaken by a team from the Audit Commission who visit the authority, spend a fortnight there, talk to a lot of people, look at a lot of detailed information and arrive at an assessment. That assessment is then fed into the machine alongside performance indicator information about the services for which the authority is responsible, together with summary outcomes of previous inspections which have been carried out by organisations such as OFSTED and the Best Value Inspection Service and so on. Our experience was that the part of the process that involved detailed engagement between the inspectors and the authority was very helpful because new sets of pairs of eyes were brought to bear on activities. There was a genuine dialogue in our case. I am not sure that has been the case in every authority in the country. A fairly detailed report was prepared and the process was constructive. The further we get towards something that boils down the outcomes of a range of visits by inspectorates, by the Audit Commission, by OFSTED, by the SSA to try to boil it all down to a single one word descriptor of the authority for the full range and diversity of services that an authority like Bristol City Council delivers, the less helpful it becomes and the more detached from specific things that we can do to improve specific services.

Chairman: Thank you very much. I am going to ask Michael Trend to continue.

Mr Trend

456. Can I go to a more specific case, that of the Health Service and ask Mr Filochowski who has some outstanding qualifications here. We saw this morning some local clinicians informally here, then we went to the Infirmary and met some of the senior managers and consultants there and we asked them about their trust, their situation. They were clearly extremely depressed that they are a no-star organisation. They felt very strongly that their CHI figures were good, they felt they gave good care, morale was surprisingly high for a hospital which the popular local press regarded as failing, the word that the Department used, and did not have a proper chief executive at the moment, all sorts of problems with which I am sure you will be familiar. However, you have a record of turning a no-star trust into a two-star Trust. What clues would you give your colleagues in Bristol?
(Mr Filochowski) I do understand a lot of their feelings, indeed I am sure I know the people you were talking to. I think it is a highly imperfect system but one which I have come to believe has a lot of advantages. I think there is little doubt that a poor rating does concentrate the minds, in fact Councillor Bees to my left has just said as much, and I think it is fair to say that our getting a no-star rating at Medway had a completely galvanising effect upon us, I think partly because it was unfair, but I still say it had a galvanising effect upon us. I think therefore one needs to separate issues about how do you measure, how well do you measure�and you must measure the right things and get it right�from the issue of does it have an impact and effect, and my view would be that across the public sector we have got some of the measures right and some wrong but the impact of that sort of assessment is, I am in no doubt, very important, and I can assure you not only does it depress people but when they get it right it elates them and certainly in Medway�and by the way it was also wrong in giving us a two-rating, we should have had three stars but that was okay�

457. Was it unfair originally because they had measured inaccurately or because they had measured the wrong things?
(Mr Filochowski) It was unfair because it was a snapshot of something that was true 18 months previously but was no longer true at the time at which it was measured. I think that is an issue about getting current measurements. I would have to say the measurement on Bath was true at the time it was measured so it is not a universally wrong thing, but again that is a very important issue. The Secretary of State can speak for himself but he did say on the Today programme in July that we got up in Medway determined to prove him wrong. He said, "You proved me wrong, that is fine." It is the first time I have heard a politician admit he was wrong and it was a delight that he was prepared to say that. I found again in Bath that morale was absolutely through the floor, but I have to say that morale was not through the floor because of the performance rating�people knew it was bad�the performance rating just made them feel even worse. They knew it was bad and now we have turned it round they feel great because they know that it is their effort that is turning it round and there is some objective measure of their turning it round which again I think is important. A purported objective measure that shows you are bad is really depressing but when it shows you are good, my God, you feel good about it. If you had got a couple of three-star trusts they would say, "Oh yes, it accurately measures where we are."

458. I understand that. As I say, the people we have talked to did have quite high morale, which did surprise me, they did feel the service they provided was pretty good and the concentration on the star system reduced the tension between headline grabbing figures and clinical judgment.
(Mr Filochowski) Would you like me to comment?

459. Yes?
(Mr Filochowski) It could do. Again we come down to the issue of what the right measures are and whether the star rating measures everything, and it manifestly does not. Bath came out easily the worst in the country at the same time as its clinical measures put it amongst the top ten hospitals in the country. There is absolutely no doubt that clinical care at the Royal United Hospital has always been amongst the best in the country and there are good objective measures of that. I would advise you if you are ill that is about as good a place as any for you to go. The problem is you have to be able to get into the place. It is no good getting good care if you cannot get into the place, so the star rating was measuring something very important in my view.