Flexible goalposts

As local authorities are often among those who squeal loudest about the government's obsession with targets and statistics, I thought it would be instructive to look at Cornwall Council's own basket of performance indicators.

Introduced in May last year, the monthly monitoring tells us that some things are better than expected and some things not so good. Overall, though "65% of indicators are now achieving or exceeding target." Phew. But then 14% are worse than target and 21% are much worse. Doh!

As a hack journo, I was particularly amused to see how the council tries to steer its own public relations. Can you guess what percentage of council press releases are targeted to actually appear in the press? (Clue: it's not 100%) Or how about the target percentage of bad press articles? (Another clue: it's not zero.)

Here are the latest monthly stats:

Target percentage of press releases which actually appear in the press - 88%

Percentage of press releases which did appear in the press - 94.2%

Target percentage of bad press articles - 12%
Actual percentage of bad press articles - 6.7%

Target percentage of good press articles - 43%
Actual percentage of good press articles - 33.9%

As a self-confessed fan of the council's press office, which in my opinion is extremely professional and hard-working, I do wonder about the value attached to such targets. The report to next week's cabinet, which describes the percentage of good press articles as "much worse than targeted," seems unduly harsh - you can only spin a good yarn if there's a good yarn there to be spun.

Much more important, in my view, is the performance indicator which tells us that the number of social workers off sick is also "much worse than targeted."

Perhaps some of these statistics are related?