Targets

What does 90 patients in Kent dying of Clostridium Difficile have in common with the Surrey Constabulary coming top of the performance league and with a £130million budget increase to the National Drug Treatment Agency resulting in a mere 70 extra patients 'going clean? Answer - idiotic targets. Pressure to cut waiting times & costs caused Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells Trust to fail to properly see to cleanliness; Surrey chief constable discovered that his officers were boosting numbers by focusing on soft targets & ignoring tough cases; the Treatment Agency was spending money getting treatment numbers up rather than actually getting results. It would be a surprise if these were the only cases where addiction to 'targets' was not having a perverse result.

'Not everything that counts can be counted & not everything than can be counted counts' Albert Einstein.

Liberal Democrats accept that targets have their place but not when they are misconceived and used as the principal, sometimes only, measure of achievement.

Footnote: one of the policy motions passed at the LibDem Conference in September was to scrap all centrally imposed Targets on Local Government.