Cucumber Slices, Tick Boxes And Ultimate Failure

I posted yesterday about some of the insane things the British police are treating as crimes. Assault with a slice of cucumber, cream puffs tossed at buses, that sort of thing. The police themselves are pretty well disgusted with the things they are being forced to report as crimes in order to meet performance quotas the bureaucrats have come up with. Today, Melanie Phillips discusses those inane, pointless and ultimately harmful "targets" along with a number of other sectors that have also bee the victim of bureaucratic tick box mentality.

People who wonder why the police are not doing more to prevent crime and arrest criminals might rub their eyes at claims made yesterday by the Police Federation.

It would seem that one reason why there never seems to be a police officer around when you are being mugged or your house is being burgled is that our police service has turned itself into a stage for the theatre of the absurd.

It has simply turned the concepts of crime and order on their heads.

Incidents which ten years ago would have led to a word of advice are now landing thousands of people with criminal records.

Ludicrously, such incidents listed by the Federation include a man who was cautioned for being "in possession of an egg with intent to throw"; a child who was arrested for lobbing a slice of cucumber at another child; and a woman who was arrested on her wedding day for criminal damage to a car park barrier when her foot slipped on the accelerator.

Then there is the case reported today of the boy who collected £700 for Comic Relief but failed to hand in the money.

Because it had been collected from 542 different people, Home Office rules stipulate that this counts as 542 crimes solved - which the police force dutifully logged……

…….This is all because the Government decided that the way to force the public services to deliver better results was to set performance targets that they had to meet.

This would publicly separate the efficient public service sheep from the backsliding goats -and most important of all, would enable the Government to boast to the public of actual improvements in service that had been achieved.

But it hasn't worked like that at all. Instead, it has produced a tick-box mentality which has grossly distorted priorities and driven the public services off the rails altogether.

In the health service, hospitals were given targets, for example, for the reduction of waiting lists.

This was enforced with single-minded ruthlessness; civil servants would phone hospital managers and scream at them if these targets had not been met.

The result was that the managers took the easiest option.

Patients whose conditions were fastest to treat took priority over those whose conditions were more serious but would take longer to treat - some of whom disappeared off such lists altogether.

Waiting list numbers accordingly went down, targets were met - and suffering hugely increased.

Meanwhile, the real problem of the NHS - that it was bust - was never addressed. It was masked instead by bogus performance figures which falsely proclaimed that things were getting better, even as the service sank into bankruptcy and chaos.

(Still think socialized medicine is a good idea?) The list goes on. Education is another area where targets and tick box mentality has driven the system to failure. The entire socialized, centrally planned system is collapsing - a slow motion repeat of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communism light works not a whit better than full-bore Communism. There is a lowest common denominator approach inherent in such schemes. That approach always leads to the lowest possible results as mediocrity becomes the norm - in fact, the requirement - for public service.