At the beginning of December, the UK government announced their “plan for change”—a plan to become "mission-driven" by focusing on "ambitious, measurable, long-term objectives". There is no doubt that our public services require deep care, investment, and change after the devastation wrought by austerity, the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis. But the focus on the measurement of milestones that is at the centre of the plan for change risks jeopardising the whole project. Established research shows that target-centric service delivery results in people trying to meet their targets rather than make real change—and our own research shows that this risks creating distrustful working conditions that endanger workers’ health and wellbeing.

How we got here

The plan for change is trying to create greater government transparency and ensure that the work of government is effective. That’s a bold and important goal, but the focus on measurement risks making the same mistakes that have been made in government reform programmes in the past.

Since the 1980s, public service delivery and management in the UK has been characterised by “New Public Management”, an approach that equates the delivery of public services with a business product. For the purposes of this post, the main change to consider here was the introduction of targets, evaluations, and performance management. In the period from Thatcher onwards, we saw a steady rollout of more and more metrics, targets, and supposed indicators of quality.

With the introduction of austerity policies in 2010/11, this focus on metrics and measurement intensified, because there was much less money around to fund services. As we all know, budgets were slashed, local authorities commissioned out more services, public and third sector organisations had to do more with less, and some vital services were lost. "Value for money", "evidence-based" policymaking, and "outcomes-based commissioning" became the order of the day, with the hope of making more “efficient” public services. Not only did organisations have to do more with less, but they had to prove they were doing more with less—through evaluation.

Measuring austerity

Through their PhD research, kieran explored how this focus on evaluating outcomes in a context of reduced funding shifted the work of public service delivery, and how that felt. They worked with around 100 workers and around 100 young people throughout the research, building meaningful relationships as they embedded myself in organisations and exploring what austerity had done to them and how they were continuing to exist despite those changes.

They found that if an organisation wants to demonstrate their value for money, they have to be quicker, cheaper, or bigger than their competitors. If a service can't (or doesn't want to) be quicker, cheaper, or bigger, then they have a fourth option available to them: create more evidence about their impact and the outcomes they work creates to make them seem competitive.

We know that there are problems with focusing on outcomes—that outcomes are produced by systems, not individual projects, and that there are issues with how outcomes are created and measured. What we’re focusing on here is how workand service delivery changes because of the presence of outcomes (or targets, or milestones, or whatever we want to call them).

The emergence of justification practices

These changes are a shift towards justification practices. We coined this term to describe the new labour (and the associated experiences) that workers have to undertake that is focused on justifying their work rather than doing it. This can be to funders (in the form of evaluations) or in the form of justifying the reason they are falling short of their own hopes for their practice to themselves.

The symptoms will be recognisable to many: high workloads, low-paid work, part-time roles, people working beyond contracted hours, stress, burnout, constantly having to pick up new skills. The underfunding of this system practically relies on workers that are willing to exploit themselves because they care, who will work too much and deprioritise themselves because they want to help people.

It leads to:

• workers doing work they’re not trained for
• new forms of emotional labour
• creating less trusting workplaces with more managerial control

Doing work you’re not trained for

As managers and decision-makers applying for funding for new work, a new commission, or are trying to enhance their organisation's reputation, workers have to navigate a constant state of change. This work helps to keep organisations running, but the constant change in what work actually consists of can make workers can feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. Given the pressures on time, this tends to result in workers doing things that they're not trained for, and trying to pick up skills on the fly. That might be running a youth participation group, taking on project management despite never having done it before, or running a training course whilst learning the content of the course yourself.

One youth worker Kieran worked closely with explained to them that he felt his organisation was "doing too much. We’re doing more now than we ever were but with less capacity. Training? That was never really what we were about! [His manager] just agrees to everything but then we’re the ones who have to do it."

New forms of emotional labour

Too much work being brought into the organisation can lead to a culture in which workers feel that their emotions are deprioritised. Many of the workers Kieran researched with reported extremely high levels of stress, anxiety, confusion and overwhelm. Care and support work is a field that naturally necessitates a high degree of emotional labour, whereby workers have to manage their feelings, facial expressions, and bodily behaviours to create a "publicly observable" sentiment that might be different from how they are actually feeling.

Emotional labour exists as a normal part of care and support work, but the changes introduced by austerity meant that workers had to manage the additional emotional labour of having to appear happy, calm, and stable in a work environment which is making them stressed, anxious, and incapable. It can result in people going "panic mode" at a moments' notice, as one person did. Yet each moment where these feelings actually break through obscures many more experiences of succeeding in performing emotional labour—not letting your colleagues or managers see how you're feeling, how difficult you're finding your job, how much you're struggling with your workload.

One woman Kieran worked closely with was desperate to leave her job, but was worried what would happen if she did. She knew that she effectively was the project; if she left, the project might stop happening, and all of the meaningful relationships she had built with young people would disappear. She didn't leave.

Less trusting workplaces with more managerial control

Managers are workers, but they aren't like other workers. They're more susceptible to the pressures the organisation experiences from the wider system. If an organisation has agreed to deliver a project (and reaching a certain target, or pre-identified outcomes), then managers and decision-makers are ultimately responsible if that doesn't happen.

Managers are trying to find a way to stay afloat in a compromised system that has had its budgets cut and expectations raised. In so doing, they become more likely to use management techniques of control, or have to “put their foot down”. At the same time, they might be trying to create a positive atmosphere to work in. The combination of these approaches together creates a confusing experience for workers that creates distrust and can make them feel as if their experiences and views won’t change anything.

Control techniques might include performance management, trying to collect data from service users at any opportunity, or appearing to listen to workers but failing to follow through. These are control techniques because at their essence, they involve forcing or coercing someone to do something that they might otherwise not want to.

The use of these techniques is an attempt by managers to reduce or remove the uncertainty that necessarily exists in an uncertain environment. The contracts they are managing treat the environment of service provision as if it can be controlled and made certain. A project can't commit to producing changes in outcomes for a certain number of people before they start delivery because service provision is relational, uncertain, and dynamic. Yet because contracts leverage legal and financial control mechanisms (such as results-based or milestone payments), managers are forced to pass on this assumption of certainty.

Even in a progressive organisation, a manager working under a contract like this is put in a position where they must make their workers comply with delivering on the commitments of the contract or grant agreement. Managers hold onto the good intentions that got them into their work as a justification for using control techniques—”I don't want to work like this, but if I don't do this, then we might lose the contract and be unable to help the people we're helping”. These justification practices obscure the harm that might be being done.

Learning, not measurement

The plan for change’s focus on “ambitious, measurable, long-term objectives", then, and the early indications of its approach to public service reform seem to imply a return to—and perhaps an intensification of—the New Public Management consensus, dressed up with a little more focus on technology. The human cost of evaluating outcomes in this way is that the focus of public services becomes justification practices rather than service delivery.

Research has shown that targets, milestones, and outcomes lead to people gaming the system. People focus on producing justifications of why their work is valuable more than doing valuable work. Sometimes, these justifications are about producing evaluation data (typically quantitative outcomes data), but other times, they are the justifications that people make to themselves about why they are continuing to work in this way.

Justification practices emerge in any environment where funding is made conditional and competitive, the conditionality of that funding rests upon the measurement or evaluation of an aspect of that practice, and the conditionality of that funding removes possibilities from the people involved, creating a situation in which ensuring positive evaluations becomes integral.

Given this, the government's attempt to create a "mission-driven" government amidst a service provision landscape struggling more year on year seems doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and reproduce these justification practices—creating phantom public services that reach targets without making change, and creating terrible working conditions in the process. Any changes under this system seem guaranteed to ensure that the labour of public service delivery becomes geared towards the production of positive evaluations rather than authentic learning about how best to support people who really need it.

As the government turns its attention towards making real and lasting change (for example, with the creation of a new youth strategy), we need to take a fresh look at quantitative targets, and how we evaluate and learn about public services so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.