CENTRE POINT
It all depends on what you mean
SIMON JENKINS
ne of the pleasures of politics is that it is not mathematics. Anyone can play pol- itics. The game is full of mystery, uncertain- ty and power. Politics can strive to save a Newfoundland halibut or Bart's Hospital or Labour's Clause Four. Mathematics can- not. But can mathematics make a good chief constable better? Or will it just make him mad?
The Hampshire chief constable, John Hoddinott, has been told that he is to be employed on a fixed-term contract with his pay partly determined by various 'indica- tors' of his performance. This is the idea not of his employers, the local police authority, but of the Home Office in Lon- don, which claims the right to interfere in such things. A Whitehall spokesman described Mr Hoddinott's contract as 'a perfectly reasonable way of managing scarce resources'. This portrayal of the chief constable as if he were an overused office fax machine infuriated him. He is this year's president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. His predecessor, Sir John Smith of the Metropolitan Police, shared his fury. Mr Hoddinott was content about the fixed term but not about perfor- mance pay. It was beneath his dignity and that of the public service ethos for which he works. He refused to sign.
Mr Hoddinott joins a lengthening list of public officials whose incomes ministers wish to determine by mathematical out- puts, though perish the thought that the same should apply to them. This 'league table culture', as it is termed, was once con- fined to football managers. It now embraces secondary school teachers, hospi- tal administrators, university scholars and, most recently, chief police officers. There is no limit to the absurdities involved. Hospi- tals are being judged by how many people die in their custody. Schools are judged by examination passes. Universities are judged by the volume of published papers their lecturers and professors produce. Those who head these institutions have the scores set against their names and, it is proposed, against their pay. The sheer daftness of the league tables is immaterial. Facts are what was wanted of Mr Gradgrind and facts is what the auditors are supplying. Any old facts will do.
A sports league table is based on winning or losing. In public administration the scor- ing system is more complex. The teams do not play against each other, but are marked by an umpire in absentia. The Department of Education even employs people called `quality auditors' to vet scholastic output from universities. (Time was when aca- demics would have burned the department down for such presumption.) The placings are bitterly contested and the umpires are frequently accused of changing the rules from year to year. Yet nobody dares ask the Joad question: 'It all depends on what you mean . . .' Nobody can quarrel with the great god statistics.
Down on the ground the streetwise know what to do — and are already doing it. The sensible hospital ships its hopeless cases out to a hospice to die. The sensible school selects its entrants with care and expels its DIE-grade candidates for smoking. The sensible university signs up journalists as `visiting professors' and rates their articles as score points for research grading. As for the police, their three performance indica- tors have just been published by the Audit Commission. Anybody wishing to examine the `dumbing' of British government need look no further. They are ludicrous unless like Mr Hoddinott's your pay might depend on them.
One indicator is the time it takes a police car to respond to a 999 call compared with the time it thinks it ought to take. The other two are the number of recorded crimes that are detected and the number of police officers per citizen (an odd sort of `performance'). The Audit Commission half-heartedly admitted that these indica- tors have limitations but asserts that these `do not invalidate comparisons'. But that is precisely what they do. The figures on 999 calls and detection rates depend entirely on how a police force chooses to record local incidents. Practice on this varies so widely as to make comparative figures unreliable, as the Home Office's own crime figures now acknowledge. To use incident figures as the basis for a published league table is like asking a cricket team to say how many The "Rights of Person ; you sexist.' runs it would have scored in a match had it not been for the bowling.
If Mr Hoddinott were a less honest man, he would have kept quiet, and would turn Hampshire into the apple of the Home Office's eye. He would tell his officers never to leave their cars and refuse all assistance not requested by a 999 call. He would treat all thefts from cars as negligence and refuse to enter them in incident books. He would disregard vandalism, dismiss rape com- plaints as vexatious and arrest every drug user and male prostitute in the county. This would send his recorded crime rate down (as has happened nationwide since indica- tors were first mooted) and his detection rate up. Up too would go his salary. It is easily done. Ask any chief constable.
The 'value-for-money' auditors will soon- er or later catch up with such tricks, but the tricks will always keep one step ahead. Government pay is going the same way as government grants to local councils. It will soon involve fiendishly complex differential equations adjusting the league tables for demography, poverty, age of buildings and anything a cunning negotiator can think of. The smart chief constable will deal with Whitehall not with a police lawyer by his side but with a police mathematician.
Of all the management fads to seize Whitehall in recent years the quantification of 'professional outputs' is the most ridicu- lous. Everyone involved knows that perfor- mance bonuses, like 'peer-group assess- ment', is a covert way of boosting top pay without scaring the unions. The Treasury would have stopped it long ago, except that the Treasury are planning it for themselves. These are gilt-edged Spanish practices. They will rank with the finest of the Fleet Street print unions.
What is impressive about the Hampshire chief constable is that he has made a pro- fessional issue out of saying no to this non- sense, even if it costs him money. He has told us all that we are being taken for fools. There are some things that cannot be mea- sured, one of which is professional leader- ship. As Mr Hoddinott rightly said last week, The notion that I will work harder or more effectively because of perfor- mance-related pay is absurd and objection- able, if not insulting.' Hampshire police authority should give Mr Hoddinott a high- er salary for his honesty.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
Previous page
