Why targets are on their way back, but scarier

There are two tragedies about the government's adoption of payment-by-results in public services, as I explained in an article in Local Economy just after Christmas.

First, that they will inevitably end up like targets, with a huge bureaucratic hinterland.  Second, that Whitehall seems blissfully ignorant of this - imagining that it was some new method of controlling outcomes, rather than the same old idea with knobs on.

I wrote the article after attending an internal seminar in one of the big government departments a year or so ago.  Having been told that their policies included ending targets and starting payment-by-results, I asked about the contradiction between them - and was told there wasn't one.

I worried about this for some months, wondering whether it was me who was making a mistake, and finally wrote the Local Economy article as a kind of reply.

But there is still a difference, as I predicted then:

"By the end of the targets regime, regulators found themselves prosecuting teachers and doctors for fiddling their target results.  The next step in payment-by-results will be the inevitable prosecution of charity workers and social enterprise managers for manipulating the data to speed up their long-awaited evidence-based payments – because this will not just be fiddling with definitions to look good. It will be fraud..."

Sure enough, the news today says that A4e, the huge agency involved in getting claimants back to work - and paid by 'results' - is being investigated after accusations that they may have faked the data.  Staff have been suspended.  There will be so many more stories like this in the years ahead.

I've no idea what the result will be.  I have some admiration for A4e's founder Emma Harrison for her imaginative approach to human transformation (though I don't see why anyone needs to be paid so much).  This isn't about A4e - it is about the inevitable result of the payment-by-results regime.

Next there will be safeguards and codes and rules, and ferocious auditing, and soon the whole vast infrastructure of New Labour's targets will be back. 

In the old days, I remember one voluntary organisation saying quietly at a meeting: 'If any couples come in, mark them both down as women - we haven't got enough of those'.  That kind of manipulation was sometimes the only way to survive the corrosive regime at the little lamented Government Office for London.  Under payment-by-results, it will now be fraud.  The sooner we abandon the whole idea the better.

What do we do instead?  Ah well, that's a matter for another blog.