After criticism, by a chief constable, of his attempt to set out targets for the amount of time police spend on the beat, Gordon Brown yesterday pledged that -once the inconvenience of the general election is out of the way - his freshly-mandated Labour Government will introduce a new set of targets for all public services.
As a spokesman for the PM said:
Over the years it has become clear that whenever we set targets for schools, hospitals, the police and other public services in order to improve those services, those services – in fact – get worse. This is because the managers spend all their time massaging and fiddling the figures to show that they have met the targets we have set, whilst ignoring everything else. So, in consequence, you have patients starving to death in hospital wards because everyone working in the hospital is too busy spending all their working hours making sure every pillow in every hospital bed meets the government’s target of 96% Of All Hospital Pillows Rated As ‘Quite Comfy’ to bother with the patients.
So, once we have won the election, we are going to introduce a new government target scheme throughout the public services where all public services must not reach any of the targets we set. In future, then, all public services will have to make sure they reach this new target by not reaching any other government targets at all.
So, quite simply any public service such as a hospital or school that reaches any of the targets we have set out for it, will – quite obviously fiddling the figures and will then fall foul of this new target of not reaching any targets - and – consequently – there will be severe penalties for that institution.
However, if the institution does meet the new target by failing to meet the old targets then obviously it too will be regarded as a failed institution for not reaching the old targets.
Therefore, when something – inevitably – does go wrong we can blame the management for not meeting one of our targets, and – therefore – claim it was not the fault of the government at all.
A spokeswoman for the public services welcomed the move, saying:
Obviously the more targets there are the better. More targets mean more managers, and more staff for those managers. Eventually, there will come a point where the NHS, the police, the education system and all other public services will employ nothing but managers, each making sure that the other managers in the service are reaching their allocated targets, and we won’t have to bother with all that tiresome - and time-wasting business - of serving the public, who are – quite frankly – a bunch of ungrateful tossers who never seem to appreciate the nice pretty graphs we produce for them showing how we have met all the targets the government set for us.
As the BBC’s Social Affairs correspondent added:
When these public services fail to meet their targets, whichever target that is, the government has announced that the institution will be taken into ‘special measures’, which may mean that the management of that institution will be removed from their posts
Then, after a suitable period suspended on full pay, until everyone has forgotten the scandal, and the 5 year inquiry into it which cleared them of any responsibility for all the cock-ups that occurred under their stewardship, they will be moved to higher paying jobs elsewhere in the system.
That means we can be sure that the system will be able to carry on as before with little or no disruption from the world outside.
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