indicators’ seems unexceptionable. The attempt to define
performance indicators has, however, become more controversial and
central to the political process in Britain in the light of a number of
political developments. These developments include the role of such
indicators as part of the privatisation process; their use in the context
of ‘Citizen’s Charters’; and their role in public sector pay bargaining.
In the privatisation process, performance indicators are important
in defining the standard of service to be expected from the privatised
service provider. Merely specifying a maximum level of profits or
prices could encourage the provider to produce a substandard ser-
vice (perhaps with minimal investment) allowing exploitation of a
monopoly position. Thus an electricity company is required to
restore any interruptions to supply to at least 85 per cent of domestic
customers within three hours (Southern Electric, 1994: 7). Such
indicators can then be policed by an independent regulator (in this
case the director-general of electricity supply) with ‘league tables’ of
the efficiency of each supplier being compilable and the possibility of
the removal of franchises from non-performing companies.
In a series of ‘Citizen’s Charters’ the Conservative Major govern-
ment in Britain established publicly known standards of performance
to which consumers/citizens are entitled. In some cases compensation
is payable for underperformance (e.g. refunds on rail season tickets if
trains run persistently late). In some cases these standards have been
criticised as unacceptably anodyne (e.g. ‘you will get a reply within
seven days’ – but the letter may merely say, ‘We are looking into it’).
Such standards may be linked to the appraisal of the performance
of individual public servants, which, in turn, may be linked ulti-
mately to some sort of payment by results. Such moves have been
opposed by most public sector trade unions as a move away from
nationally negotiated common standards of pay and service toward
individual contracts and as failing to recognise environmental factors
that affect individual performance.
One of the major problems may be that those aspects of per-
formance which are most easily quantified are not necessarily the
most significant parts of the public sector organisation or individuals’
work. Yet, particularly where managers’ pay or career success are felt
to be crucially affected by them, such performance indicators may
come to be ‘the tail that wags the corporate dog’. Thus if police officers
and forces are judged by the crime clear-up rate, crime prevention and
POLICIES 233