I ALWAYS LIKED the phrase “What matters is what works”, though I cannot trace its true parent. It chimes with every experience of ordinary life, private and public. Together with its sister proverb, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, it avers that not everything good is consistent and symmetrical.

Sometimes archaic structures work well — take the “Elder and Younger Brethren” of Trinity House, who sound like medieval dressers-up yet manage lighthouses and buoys with admirable practicality. Or consider the wooden wedge that stops the washing-machine waltzing round the kitchen floor. You could have the whole floor taken up and levelled, but why? The wedge does very well. Whenever innovations or replacements do appear — restructuring, IT, whatever — they should be eased in cautiously, so as not to interrupt good service. Conversely, when old systems patently don’t work they should be put down without sentimentality. What matters is what works.

When Tony Blair adopted the mantra before the 1997 election I was pleased, being heartily sick of ideologically driven idiocies like John Major’s rail privatisation. Since old Labour ideology had been binned, I hoped this lot would offer solid pragmatic management without showbiz posturing. The depth of the ensuing disappointment is history. Blairism has torn down effective structures in law and administration like an impulsive would-be decorator who rips off festoons of old wallpaper and leaves it in tatters for months. It has wasted millions on management consultancy, wrecked the House of Lords without deciding what to have instead and continually announces showy initiatives without following them through (what happened to us all having a personal health trainer? So far, we can’t even get an NHS dentist). It wasted eons of parliamentary time faffing around with foxhunting, to little effect, and fell heavily for the managerialist culture of “target-setting”. This latter horror sounds dynamic, but hardly ever does more than make the targetees fiddle their results and distort their priorities.

Targets! Years ago, at the start of this mania, I sat on a charity committee that spent a long meeting trying to decide between a target of 82 per cent of 24-35s marking us more than 5 on a scale of 10 by 2005, or perhaps 67 per cent of 24-64 year olds marking us as a 6 by 2010. When I asked why we couldn’t have spent the two hours just inventing ways of making ourselves popular, I was slapped down with a reproving “Target-setting is a valuable discipline”, as the chairman marched proudly onwards up his own backside.

Government targets do not invigorate public bodies: rather they alarm and distort. Watch how many schools push easy GCSE subjects and teach to the test, drilling SAT pupils to serve the school’s credit, not young minds. Witness the impossibility of booking a GP appointment next week because of the two-day rule, or the way some hospitals employ clerical staff to cancel operations at just under 48 hours notice (because then they don’t count). Witness the fiasco of GPs’ pay, which needed a moderate hike but which instead was absurdly inflated by the decision to pay them extra for hitting targets on record-keeping and nagging fat people, which most were doing anyway. What matters is what works? Nobody looked closely to see how GPs worked; as with education reforms, what matters in Blairism is a fussy ideology of micro-management from the centre by target and tickbox.

All this disappointment resurfaced with one telling detail of the fiasco over foreign prisoners. Several newspapers quote a Home Office immigration insider saying that over two years ago there was an informal instruction about foreign convicts. After Mr Blair’s undeliverable top-of-the-head promise in a BBC interview that he would cut asylum applications by half in seven months, Mr Blunkett told his officials to make it so. Hence immigration officers were ordered to cancel their regular visits to prisons to monitor the release of foreigners deserving deportation. The source said “senior officials knew that most of the prisoners up for deportation would automatically claim asylum. This was one of several ‘creative’ solutions thought up to please ministers. By not addressing the issue of people coming out of prison who were likely to claim asylum, the official figures would be reduced.”

See? Target culture harming performance. This startling allegation is backed up by a letter on the same lines sent to Robert Wilson, MP, by an immigration officer last week. They are, he said, being banned from dealing with arrested immigrants unless they are already failed asylum-seekers. It’d harm the figures.

Well, we all know that the Home Office is a swamp. And while I am as reluctant as any hack to allow ministers to “hide behind officials”, I have to say that during all this time — and during the business of officials blandly “failing to recall” how David Blunkett’s lover got her nanny-visa so fast — the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office was Sir John Gieve, who has now floated stainlessly upwards with a knighthood and the deputy governorship of the Bank of England. It would be nice to see him hauled back to explain about the prisoners. And Mr Blunkett. Charles Clarke may be a pompous, thin-skinned and anti-libertarian minister and he was damnably slow to heed the warnings: yet he should not carry the can alone.

And everyone, in government or any kind of business, should look askance at the poisonous managerialist idea that the vigorous thing to do is always to set a statistical “target”. It isn’t. It is about as useful as my habit of making lists headed “To Do Saturday”, and promptly falling asleep. It is as big a waste of time as those massive “revision timetables” your children are currently constructing, with four different-coloured ballpoints, instead of actually revising. You can bring hopes and resolution to a task; but targetism is a footling displacement activity. And it can lead to worse: distortion, cheating, danger. It just has.

Join the Debate

Send your e-mails via here

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden