The National Audit Office showed how hospitals massage waiting list times to meet their targets

The National Audit Office showed how hospitals massage waiting list times to meet their targets. We have learned of hospitals that prefer to conduct many routine minor operations rather than fewer urgent, serious, operations, so enhancing the operating rate, the success rate and the reduction in waiting lists all at once.The methods of manipulating the figures are legion, as are the opportunities. Schools enter pupils only for those exams they are likely to pass so as to improve their league-table standing Crimes go unregistered if clear-up seems unlikely. Court waiting time has been cut for young offenders but not for others.

Meanwhile the bureaucracy needed to monitor all this target fulfilment has grown exponentially.Somewhere along the line, the point of recording all these indicators and targets has been lost. It is one thing to track how money is spent, draw valid comparisons and spread “best practice”. It is quite another for targets to be set as ends in themselves.If we are now seeing the beginning of the end of target-setting for its own sake, that is as positive a development as was New Labour’s move to document the performance of public services in the first place. A more malign interpretation is that the Government has decided to minimise the significance of its targets in the knowledge that it cannot meet them. That would be a political failure of the first order, that no target-scrapping should be allowed to disguise.. It may not have realised it, but the Government did something of real, far-reaching, significance this week.

It wasn’t just that it announced the end of hare coursing and deer hunting, although that was a very welcome breakthrough. On behalf of the RSPCA’s members, I would like to unreservedly thank ministers for moving to end these vile bloodsports. More than that, though, I also want to thank the Government for saying, loud and clear, that no one has the liberty to be cruel. In doing so, the Government has set out a crucial philosophical principle for the forthcoming debate, and one that, I believe, will inevitably lead to the end of all hunting with hounds, including fox hunting.