Numerical targets miss the point

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The statement by the First Minister on Monday that no new target for the number of coronavirus tests to be carried out would be set has unsurprisingly provoked criticism from political opponents. They’ve seen an open goal and aimed at it, even if the Tories’ criticism is more than a little hypocritical given the abject failure of their own government in London to get anywhere near its own targets. And, given that there are reports of rifts within the English cabinet (and, when it discusses health issues, it is indeed acting as an English cabinet not a UK one) as to whether the targets are meaningful or useful anyway, they might be about to be outflanked by their own side. Still, I suppose that’s balanced by Labour’s own hypocrisy in abandoning such a target in Wales whilst continuing to criticize the English Health Minister for not achieving the target he set for England.

On the substance of the issue, I have considerable sympathy for the First Minister’s position. There is little point setting targets which may turn out to be unachievable on issues over which you do not have complete control; it simply sets people up to fail and presents opposition parties with an open goal. And the ‘target’ in this case looks to have been entirely arbitrary – geared more to a compromise between what they thought might be achievable and what would be politically acceptable rather than what is needed to deal with the problem. More generally, I’m not a fan of management or government by target anyway – it can often lead to the ‘wrong’ behaviour. I once sat through a meeting in a local authority at which a senior officer pointed out to the members that they were exceeding one particular target laid down by central government, and that one way of saving money would be to reduce the level of service in that area in order to merely meet, rather than exceed, the target. Targets are often set largely as a means of measuring and quantifying progress towards the achievement of an objective; they are just a proxy for the real goal but can end up being the sole focus. Managing to meet a target encourages people to concentrate on the targets rather than understand and pursue the underlying objective. In politics, they can also encourage oppositions to criticise a numerical failure rather than evaluate the quality of the response in relation to the problem which the government is seeking to solve. Easy headlines is no substitute for quality scrutiny.

That said, the disappointing part of the First Minister’s statement was not that there will be no target, but the absence of detail about how the government plans to achieve the underlying objective, which I assume is to do with identifying and getting on top of any new outbreak quickly before it gets out of control. It is clear that any such strategy inevitably involves conducting significantly more tests but trying to set a precise number is irrelevant – it could be lower (but is more likely to be much higher) than any number conjured out of the air. ‘Whatever it takes’ isn’t easily turned into a nice round number. It should, though, be turned into a strategy and plan, and that seems to be as absent in Wales as it is at UK level at present.