Workplace goals are everywhere, but are they used to dupe the public and mask inefficiency?

Is Britain becoming a Stalinist nation? Tom Cannon, a management expert, thinks so. "We have a very Stalinist government," he says. He should know. Recently he completed a study of management and leadership for the New Labour administration. His conclusion is: "They'd all be at home working in a Five-Year Plan. They are more Stalinist than Stalin."

Is Britain becoming a Stalinist nation? Tom Cannon, a management expert, thinks so. "We have a very Stalinist government," he says. He should know. Recently he completed a study of management and leadership for the New Labour administration. His conclusion is: "They'd all be at home working in a Five-Year Plan. They are more Stalinist than Stalin."

Jack Straw may not as yet be rounding up dissidents for the work camps, but Prof Cannon and others believe the Government is subjecting us to another form of oppression: the tyranny of targets.

In the past few days, Railtrack, the BBC and the Metropolitan police, have all illustrated the point.

Railtrack, which is obliged to hand over a comprehensive timetable of track repairs so that train companies can draw up new schedules, admitted it had to re-lay some rails a second time. In the rush to replace track in the wake of the Hatfield crash, staff discovered some lines weren't up to the job.

Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, set off speculation about ethnic quotas when he said the corporation was "hideously white".

Then Scotland Yard revealed that it had boosted minority recruitment by lumping in figures for New Zealanders, Australians and those of Irish extraction. Mr Straw had set a target of raising the number of "visible" ethnic minorities from about 2,900 now, to 8,265 by 2009. After admitting the distortion in its figures, the Met said it had gained just four minority recruits between April and September last year - not the 218 previously claimed. The number in the force had actually gone down, not up.

Paul Wiles, the Home Office's director of research, development and statistics, said the Met affair was a "classic human cock-up", but organisational experts see it as part of a tendency which reached its apotheosis in Soviet Russia. There the obsession with quotas and "plan norms" was elevated to such a pitch the economy collapsed. Quality and market demand were irrelevant; factories churned out goods just to meet their targets.

While Britain will never go that far, the Stalinist economic model highlights the dangers of too much centralisation and the imposition of unrealistic, quantity-based targets on unwilling subordinates.

"The Millennium Dome was a classic example," said John van Maurik, a management consultant. "Once it set a goal of 12 million visitors, it was doomed. It quickly became obvious it'd never reach that number. If the costings had been done on something closer to the actual figure of six and a half million, it would have been seen as a great success."

The Dome could not have massaged its figures, but the NHS distortions arising from the need to meet targets are notorious. "The fixation with reducing waiting lists meant that serious ailments were ignored while hospitals concentrated on easily treatable cases - like ingrowing toenails," said Mr Cannon, who is visiting professor at Kingston Business School. "In education, it's led to schools excluding those who get in the way of achieving exam targets. Results improve, but absenteeism shoots up."

Targets are meant to measure performance as well as improve it. But often they are rigged, deliberately or otherwise, to be easily attainable, to measure the wrong thing, or both, says Richard Scase, professor of management at the University of Kent. "I've personal experience of this. My local council has committed itself to responding to complaints within 24 hours. You get a letter saying the matter is receiving attention and they'll contact you shortly. It's then six weeks before they take action.

"The local police say they'll answer the phone within two minutes, which they do by switching you through to a call centre. It can still take hours for the police to arrive. The promises being offered are hollow."

What is being measured, says Prof Scase, is not performance, but output - just like a Soviet factory under central planning. "So-called efficiency takes the place of effectiveness; quantity of quality. The means become an end in themselves."

Prof Cannon said: "That's why 'management by objectives' was discredited in private business, just when the public service was falling in love with it. Firms have learned that targets have to be negotiated. Where employees feel involved, targets can be very useful, but 'unowned' targets are very often counter-productive and alienate the people they are supposed to motivate."

When there are question marks over the reliability and validity of performance targets, added Prof Scase, "you end up with a state of constant protest, as you have with teachers and social workers".

Targets are supposed to "stretch" the workforce, but Mr van Maurik said: "When they're misapplied, people just plod on, going through the motions. Some of them become 'in-house terrorists'. They pay lip-service to the objectives, but spread discontent by letting everyone know they have no intention of trying to meet such impossible demands."

Even in straightforward areas like sales, targets cause distortions, said Prof Cannon, recalling the filmTin Men [with Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss as rival home improvements salesmen], which was "all about achieving targets while ripping off the customers".

Prof Scase sums it up as "short-term efficiencies hampering overall effectiveness".

Whether this will deter Labour, however, is another matter. It has enthusiastically set targets for everything, from halving world poverty in 14 years' time, to ensuring that at least 86 per cent of military personnel get annual dental check-ups.

According to the Liberal Democrats, the number of targets the Government set itself mushroomed from 600 shortly after taking office to more than 6,000 by early last year.

Which raises the question: has the Government set itself a target for setting targets?