Civil servants MUST deliver on targets to slash violent crime
Patrick O’Flynn
TARGETS have a bad reputation in Whitehall, with many senior civil servants viewing them as crude devices that tend to warp the delivery of public services. Set a high-profile target for the elimination of pot-holes, for instance, and you might see smoother carriageways, but also more perilous pavements as budgets are reassigned to one from the other. Or perhaps a new definition of a pot-hole will be dreamt up somewhere in the system that will result in many craters in the road being classified as something else.
Boris Johnson clearly isn’t convinced by these objections because he told the Cabinet on Tuesday that he was setting the Government a new target of bringing violent crime down by 20 per cent. What’s more, he expected every single Whitehall department to contribute ideas and initiatives to help.
And he was right. Because although there is sometimes merit in the arguments of Whitehall’s target sceptics, much more often their push back is driven by a reluctance to be held accountable for what is happening on the ground.
CRACKING down on crime was one of the key pledges Mr Johnson set out in the Tory election manifesto, which noted: “The increase in serious violence is deeply worrying and sadly some people no longer feel as safe as they should. It is the Prime Minister’s priority to make our streets safer.”
The promise clearly chimed with the public, who handed him a decisive mandate for action. And no wonder. In 2018 recorded violent crime was 19 per cent up on the previous year, with homicides up 14 per cent. Knife crime is up about 25 per cent in the past two years. And yet the number of offenders being charged for violent crime has fallen.
This has contributed atmosphere in which increasingly appear to to an thugs think they have dominance over the forces of law and order and lawabiding citizens are much less confident in public spaces.
So while it is no doubt an inconvenience for those at the top of departments such as the Home Office and Ministry of Justice – as well as chief police officers and the Crown Prosecution Service – to be told they are going to be judged on whether they bring down violent crime by a fifth rather than whether they can waffle well at meetings, some strong political leadership is clearly called for.
Not only is Mr Johnson putting his own neck on the line by setting such an ambitious and measurable target, but by placing Home Secretary Priti Patel in charge of the Cabinet subcommittee that must drive this agenda forward, he is testing her mettle too. This is the way our political system is meant to work, with ministers setting priorities and the machinery of government then responding to their clear instructions and the public having a yardstick to measure them all by.
If this war on serious crime leads to other categories of offences being neglected, then ministers need to be alive to that and judge how to respond. But when the public has sounded the alert about violence, a steady-as-she-goes approach is no longer viable.
The anti-targets brigade is currently citing the most famous public service target of recent vintage – that patients in A&E should be seen within four hours – as evidence of how targeting can go awry. Last month only 79.8 per cent of patients were seen within that time, the worst ever recorded performance.
Yet, arguably, the furore that surrounded disclosure of those figures showed the concept of a target doing its job by highlighting failure and bringing extra pressure on the Government to do better. You can bet that the media, opposition politicians and medical leaders will all be watching like hawks when the next set of figures is released.
WHETHER in education, health, law and order or transport, huge sums of taxpayers’ money are at stake. Just allowing those running the services to assert that they should be left well alone to get on with delivering how they see fit is not good enough. Without strong supervision, every large bureaucracy will tend to operate more and more in the interests of those working inside it rather than those it is meant to serve.
By telling the entire leadership of the criminal justice system that it is going to be judged on whether it reduces violent crime, Mr Johnson risks making himself as popular as influenza in such circles.
But if the term “public servants” is to mean anything much, it must carry with it an obligation to implement the priorities of the public. Mr Johnson’s target is going to concentrate minds wonderfully.
‘Cracking down on crime was a key pledge in the Tory manifesto’