The idea that executives of the Environment Agency should be made to hand over their bonuses to the flood victims of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire is absurd. The money would be but a drop in the muddy waters of this affair, and anyway it was earned long before the rivers broke their banks. A better question is this: why were they paid bonuses in the first place?

My understanding of a bonus is that it is an additional payment from an employer, made in recognition of increased productivity. Whether it is earned by an investment broker in the City, a hod-carrier on a building site or a salesman in a Mondeo, the money is meant to represent something over and above that specified in their contract of employment; it is paid out because of the difference their work has made to the performance of a company. More effort equals more profit equals enhanced pay; it’s known as capitalism. I cannot see how a quango, which is a non-profit-making organisation, can step up production, unless it is the massively increased output of red tape.

The EA executives were paid their five-figure bonuses because they were judged to have met 42 of the 49 performance targets set by the Government. These included five out of seven flood-management projects (no irony intended), improving the environment for wildlife, protection of inland waters and the quality of bathing water. In the section on flood risk, the agency was judged to have “fully achieved its targets”, though not, it emerges, in those areas that suffered from the worst of the flooding. In defending the bonuses, Sir John Harman, the agency’s chairman, said they had been calculated “by reference to the extent to which predetermined objectives have been achieved”.

In other words, the executives were rewarded with extra money for fulfilling the terms of their employment. Not for exceeding them, not for building those extra flood barriers or filling up those much-needed sandbags, but simply for doing the job, as specified by their employers – the Government.

Meeting targets is what every nondepartmental public body is expected to do. As someone who has served my time on an NDPB, I am deeply familiar with the concept of the predetermined objective, but I never heard that we might be paid more for meeting one. Targets are things that are laid out in lists, each with its carefully crafted definition, its impenetrable jargon and its box to tick once it has been achieved. They are, in my view, a severely limiting form of creative endeavour, because they actually discourage individual enterprise; either a box is ticked or it is not; no one was ever congratulated for double-ticking or for adding in new boxes, so quite what the function of a bonus might be I find it hard to imagine. On the other hand, a failure to meet any targets was instantly noted and condemned. I do not wish to labour the point, but if the Government laid down 49 performance targets, and the EA only fulfilled 42, should that not have meant a reduction in salary rather than a bonus?

There is a more serious aspect to this quango culture, however. It is the rise and rise of the petty but all-powerful official, armed with clipboard and bearing all the authority of an impenetrable organisation, positively bristling with predetermined objectives. Because a target missed is now, apparently, a bonus postponed, these plenipotentiaries of the new bureaucracy are on the warpath.

You may recognise them by their ability to say “no”. Anybody who lives in the countryside will recognise the type, because it is here that their rules are most rigorously imposed – you may not block a path, run water off a hill, bury a farm animal, dig a ditch, light a bonfire, put up a fence or erect a shed without fulfilling the most rigorous set of procedures, and with the threat of sanctions should you fall down on the job.

Thus it was, the other day, that we learnt of new rules governing the use of water for irrigation on farming land in Scotland. Since our weekend retreat is deep in the Perthshire hills, where rainfall is a regular phenomenon, we had not regarded irrigation as high on the list of our priorities. Nevertheless, the letter that arrived was ferocious in its language. Unless we responded forthwith to new rules that had been imposed by the Scottish Executive, we would be liable to an increasing set of fines, starting at £50 and rising to several thousand. I noticed that the “target” date for imposition of these rules had already passed, and we were therefore in fining territory. I was able to assure the quango concerned (the Scottish Environment Protection Agency – Scotland’s equivalent of the EA) that we had no intention of digging Mediterranean-style irrigation canals, and the correspondence ceased. I have no doubt, however, that if we had been in breach, retribution would have been swift and unremitting.

What these organisations should perhaps remember is that we the public are not just their customers, we are their owners. We pay their bills, it is in our interests that they are supposed to act, it is to us that they are ultimately responsible. When, therefore, they deal with us, it should be in a spirit of cooperation rather than control. And if they have performed well or badly, it is we who should judge the results rather than their own boards, the Government or perhaps some distant office in Brussels.

I may be growing paranoid, but the more I think about those 49 targets, the more I wonder who drew them up. Was it the Department for Environment, to whom the EA is reponsible; or was it the EU, which lays down criteria for water standards in Britain as elsewhere in Europe? It couldn’t have been the EA itself could it? No – that’s unworthy. After all, a situation in which an organisation lays down its own guidelines, then pays itself a bonus for meeting them would be unthinkable. Wouldn’t it?

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