Outcomes and outputs: a sane users' guide

Town & Country Planning, February 2008

As I write, the media is echoing to hearty condemnations of the Archbishop of Canterbury by politicians of all flavours, for his contribution to the vexed issue of Sharia law.

Our members of parliament are queuing up to repeat some mantra about us all being subject to the one law, which is either obvious or the sort of legal cliche equivalent to 'our police are the envy of the world'.

As if there were no diversion schemes at all in this country, no Somali or Jewish 'courts', no youth courts like the one in Liverpool, no community courts like the one in Chard. As if it wasn't important to find ways of getting the various UK communities to take some responsibility for their own disputes and young people's behaviour.

I mean, what do they want? To stop the insurance industry or the football association from operating their own systems of dispute negotiation or internal discipline?

What all this makes me think is that the vast majority of our MPs have yet to grasp the basic ideas behind localism, of bringing to bear the commitment and passion of local people on problems which are often overwhelming the professionals.

Yes, there is localist rhetoric coming out of Whitehall and Westminster. Heavens, they are even rather reluctantly loosening their hold over the Local Strategic Partnerships. But after all the political sound and fury, they have only managed to reduce the targets hat apply to them from 600 to 198. It isn't to be sniffed at, but it is still a massive straitjacket.

Meanwhile, the policy world has developed one of those concepts which makes it appear that they are foregoing all that central control when they are actually doing no such thing. They call it 'measuring outcomes' or 'smart targets' – the kind that stipulates the effect that local efforts are supposed to make.

This all sounds very sensible, but it is just as flawed as the old target culture. What is the 'outcome' of the NHS, for example? Is it throughput of patients or is it the health of the population?

If it's the former then it represents a great deal of expensive effort without long-term reward. If it's the latter, then the NHS has very few levers with which to achieve it.

The effect of specifying outcome targets is to set in aspic the particular institution, without being able to imagine something else which might be – as they say – a bit more fit for purpose.

And when it comes to an institution with multiple outcomes, then you really get into difficulties. What is the measurable outcome of the planning system? Satisfied developers? Energy saving? Happy and contented people?

But if any one of those is measured, and not the others, then the whole effort of the system will be skewed.

None of this is to suggest that we need no minimum standards. Of course we do. Nor that organisations shouldn't put more effort into working out what their long-term impacts are – in fact, it would be a good thing if they did. But setting outcome targets is just as controlling as setting output targets, or any of the others. And it is almost as illusory.

The Local Government Association and IdEA are both keen on using crime statistics to measure outcomes, especially of the effects of regeneration or community schemes.

Yet we know that people often stop reporting crimes when they feel hopeless about it, but report them obsessively if they feel surprised by them. All crime figures themselves will hide other shifting changes in mood and perception.

They also hide subtle changes in statistics. In fact, the total number of crimes each year doubled in 1977 alone, not because people were especially bad that year, but simply because minor vandalism began to be classified as a crime when it wasn't before.

Read the autobiography of the former Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Robert Mark and you find descriptions of the brutal streetfights in the South Kensington area in the 1920s, where one in four policemen would be injured every year. We saw things differently then – and all of those subtle changes are obscured by the crime statistics, the so-called outcomes.

So what is the solution? I'm inclined to agree with Simon Jenkins about his proposal for a Localism 'Big Bang', when – in one fell swoop – Whitehall lets go of the lot, replacing all those outputs and outcomes with some minimum standards set by local authorities working together, and a planning inspectorate that answers to the LGA.

Will it happen? Probably not, but – in the meantime – don't let's get too confused by these seductive 'outcome' measures. They will lead us up the garden path just as fast as the rest.