How Government’s targets for public service could backfire
Targets can be useful in helping governments communicate their priorities and track progress in a way that’s transparent to the public. But targets shouldn’t be bumper stickers or shallow slogans. They need to be carefully designed if they’re going to drive the right kinds of improvements.
Badly designed targets can result in prioritising easy wins, ignoring important issues, and forcing the people providing public services to focus on a single narrow metric instead of fixing the actual problem.
There’s no point meeting a target on paper if your efforts to achieve it make life no better for the people it’s supposed to help, or even makes things worse for them.
For example, reducing the numbers of people in emergency housing sounds like a worthy goal – if those people go into stable, affordable housing, but not if they find themselves living in cars or garages.
The Government has set a goal to reduce the number of households in emergency housing, but it hasn’t included any targets for housing affordability or the availability of public housing, the things that would actually make a difference to improving lives.
Targets don’t encourage innovation or transformation. They reduce the ability of front-line staff to use their professional judgement, which is demotivating for well trained staff who feel unable to use their own expertise to provide the best support to those they are meant to be helping. This makes services less responsive. It can also mean that people don’t get the services or support they need, unless they’re the ones who happen to be being targeted by government.
Front-line workers can be overwhelmed by the bureaucratic burden of complying with targets, spending time on inputting data that could be used more beneficially doing their jobs providing direct support to people.
A simple target like getting people off the Jobseeker allowance might be politically appealing, but it’s not a meaningful measure of whether the Government approach is resulting in the right outcome.
The easiest way to achieve a target like that is to ramp up sanctions, kick people off benefits and make services hard to access, but this isn’t good for anyone if those people are still unemployed and in poverty. There need to be good jobs for them to go to, they need to be in good enough health and have stable housing, they need to have the necessary education and skills – all things that the Ministry of Social Development alone can’t influence.
If staff can’t influence the things needed to ensure a target is met, and their career prospects or pay depends on this, then these badly designed targets can incentivise gaming.
Targets that the last National-led government set for emergency room stays led to widespread gaming by some management, like moving patients to short-stay units or observation beds to avoid target breaches. Such approaches increased stress for workers and patients, and had a negative impact on the longterm outcomes that the targets were intended to address.
Getting targets right is complex, and it requires the expertise and judgement of people knowledgeable in the area and responsible for ensuring the services get delivered – which could be the same people currently facing job losses across the public service.
Targets also need to be backed up by resources to deliver on them; setting a target is meaningless if you can’t do the work to achieve it. It will be difficult for the Government to achieve some of its targets if it continues with the cuts it’s making to the public services and people doing the work.
For example, the Government has set a target for greenhouse gas emission reductions while slashing the policy initiatives that would achieve it, as well as slashing hundreds of jobs from key agencies like the Environment Ministry and Niwa which do critical work on climate change.
Ministers must consider the practical implications of setting a target, including how much time it will take front-line staff to collect the necessary data, whether they have suitable systems in place (particularly technology) to do so, and whether they have the resources to do the job.
A single target will never provide an accurate representation of the overall performance of a public service. Targets should only ever be one part of a bigger picture, taking account of the complex nature of the biggest challenges we face as a country.
We also must avoid incentives to game outcomes and make sure that services remain aligned with overall objectives.
Rather than seeing performance against targets as an answer or an easy way to assign blame, policy makers should instead use the data to ask questions and identify barriers to improvement.
The parties in government went into the last election blaming public servants for not delivering, and now they’re dismantling the capacity of the public service with cuts that will negatively impact delivery.
Setting targets for public services without also setting them up to succeed in delivering their part of them is setting us all up to fail.
It looks like a government setting up to contract out public services to for-profit private companies, much like our past experience which resulted in the running down of services and the introduction of user pays. This is an issue we all need to be concerned about.
Kerry Davies is the national secretary for the public service union, the PSA.