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The
last government deluged Britain with indicators telling us how well schools
get our children through exams, how quickly hospitals get patients through
waiting rooms, how many trains run on time, how efficient councils are at
picking up rubbish. Everyone, it seemed, was being held to account . . .
except, oddly, central government.
Ever since Tony Blair issued those "five early pledges" to put
alongside your kidney donor card, he has wanted to say: "Look, we're
accountable, too." Now hardly a week goes by without somebody in or
around government producing success measures on welfare reform, indicators of
health inequality or an easy-to- parody scorecard of whether the government
is making us happy.
Will all this make it any easier, in reality, to assess how Labour is doing,
once it has been in office long enough to have made a real difference? At
present it is subject to two contradictory influences. One is the inclination
of a young government to make an honest search for solutions. It listens to
researchers and looks carefully at evidence, in a way that, before the
election, had become unthinkable, because a mature administration can't admit
that things are wrong without itself seeming culpable.
At the same time, Labour has brought from opposition an unprecedented
capacity and desire to spin. Political advisers are said to be focused on
managing image and winning the next election rather than carrying through the
party commitments sold at the last one. As governments become middle-aged,
they naturally become more defensive. Should we therefore expect this one
rapidly to lose its adolescent zeal?
Two events in the next week will make it harder for the government to massage
its record in the years ahead. First, the New Policy Institute and the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation will publish the first set of indicators of poverty and
social exclusion in the UK. Covering everything from the number of people on
low incomes to the inaccessibility of public transport in rural areas, this
will keep annual track of progress on the government's central social policy
objective: combating exclusion. The aim is to produce something akin to the
Bank of England's quarterly inflation report and to get people used to the
idea that macroeconomic trends such as GDP growth, inflation and unemployment
are not the only things by which to judge a government. This government has
generally supported such monitoring; similar thinking is behind its
"happiness" indicators.
This year's indicators will show the Blair government inherited problems that
were getting neither rapidly better nor rapidly worse. Income distribution
fluctuated rather than going sharply up or down in the Major years.
Unemployment fell but the number of households without work for two years or
more went up. The number of young adults lacking basic qualifications showed
a long-term improvement. Future indicators will show whether Labour goes
forward or backward from this relatively neutral starting point.
Second, the Treasury is expected next week to release its own targets for
government departments, in the form of Public Service Agreements for
performance over the next three years. These, too, are really about more than
just accountable government. Linked to the spending increases announced in
July, they aim to build public support for more government spending on
priority areas like education and health, by linking funding to
effectiveness.
In his autobiography, Stephen Fry admits that, when he was 15, he wrote a
letter to Stephen Fry aged 25, telling himself off for dropping his
adolescent ideals. By setting explicit targets in its own adolescence, the
Labour government is (intentionally or otherwise) writing similar letters to
its future self, reminding it of the ideals it wants to measure up to. In
case the mature government forgets to take out these letters and read them
when the time comes, there will be no shortage of independent outsiders ready
to do so.
"Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion: Labour's inheritance"
by Catherine Howarth, Peter Kenway, Guy Palmer and Cathy Street, published by
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is available from York Publishing Services, 64
Hallfield Road, Layerthorpe, York YO31 7ZW, £16.95
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