Deep impact? How government departments measured their impact under the Coalition
What impact have government departments had in the real world under the Coalition?
What impact have government departments had in the real world under the Coalition? A new Whitehall Monitor report analyses government departments’ ‘impact indicators’, part of the Coalition’s cross-government system of performance measurement. Emily Andrews, Gavin Freeguard and Robyn Munro summarise their findings. Click on the images to enlarge.
The British public thinks politicians should prioritise ‘fulfilling the promises they make before getting elected’, but currently don’t.
Departmental Business Plans, introduced in 2010, are the latest cross-government way of measuring performance.
Each department’s Business Plan includes a series of ‘impact indicators’ which aim to measure the effect of their reforms.
- Green means it’s moved in the right direction (for example, more people moving off Job Seeker’s Allowance)
- Red means it’s moved in the wrong direction (such as more trains running late)
- Amber means it’s stayed the same or the picture is mixed
- Dark grey means the data is unavailable or incomparable.
Overall, more than half of all impact indicators have moved in the right direction compared to 2010.
However, scores, data and explanations for what the indicators mean can be difficult to find…
…and it isn’t clear that the impact indicators are being used by the public, by departments or by the centre of government.
- Performance management needs to be re-invigorated. An incoming government must set clear priorities on what outcomes it wants to see. But any new government should also be sensible around the transition of power: there is no point dismantling a system just because it was inherited from a predecessor, only to have to reconstruct it in time.
- Performance management can be used to drive cross-departmental collaboration. Any further reductions in the size of Whitehall departments should drive new, cross-departmental ways of working.
- The link to politics, and the public, is vital. Delivery of political promises could bring electoral benefits, and expresses politics in a language that matters to people.
- We need better quality data – and it should be public. And while the needs of different users may vary, there are clear benefits – both practical and in terms of perception – to transparency.
- It should be a performance management, not merely a performance measurement, regime – and there is more to it than ‘just’ the data. Data is much more powerful if used to drive improvement. That includes being able to properly assess what it means – with proper comparison against benchmarks, baselines and counterfactuals. And the data can only ever take us so far: as Einstein once said, ‘Not everything that is countable counts, not everything that counts is countable.’
- Topic
- Civil service
- Publisher
- Institute for Government