The Week in Politics: Target for today: to get rid of all the targets set so far

When cabinet ministers were drawing up the recent White Paper on energy policy, something strange happened. Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was pressing for a target by which Britain would achieve 20 per cent of its energy needs by 2020 from renewable sources such as wind and wave power.

She was backed by Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Wales and a former energy minister. The idea seemed perfectly reasonable, since it was proposed last year by Tony Blair's personal think-tank, the Performance and Innovation Unit. But the edict from Downing Street was, "We don't want to set any targets" and the proposal was squashed.

It was a significant moment. When Labour came to power, Mr Blair viewed targets as a way of "aiming high" and putting pressure on Whitehall departments to deliver the Government's objectives. His approach might have been borrowed from the poet Robert Browning, who wrote that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp".

Now Mr Blair thinks differently. An aide told me: "It is all very well setting tough targets but they have rebounded on us. They are not the right way forward in today's climate, because the opposition parties and the media will attack us for not hitting them."

There's the rub. The Government can set targets, but does not want to be held to account when it fails to achieve them.

But targets are not being abandoned. There will still be a few high-profile goals, such as Mr Blair's pledge to cut street crime last year and his recent promise to halve the number of applications for asylum in six months. (Revealingly, this was not a formal Whitehall target and his own Delivery Unit did not even know about it until he announced it on the BBC's Newsnight programme).

But the number of formal targets has already been halved from 250 to 125 and we will see fewer hostages to fortune in government policy statements. "We will outline goals but we won't put them in the same sentence as the dates," one minister said. "We will know the new targets internally but we won't make them public."

However laudable Mr Blair's aim, the Government made a rod for its own back by rushing out so many targets after 1997, often to grab a headline. Many targets were not thought through, notably the goal that 50 per cent of people should go to university by 2010. "It was written on the back of an envelope," said one adviser involved in the process. "We didn't even know the prevailing level when we set it."

The rethink is too late to stop the good headlines, when the targets were announced, from turning into bad headlines as they become due. This week, the Audit Commission reported errors in 22 of the 41 NHS trusts where it made spot checks on their waiting lists, reflecting the huge pressure on them to meet government targets. Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, prepared the ground for primary schools to fail to hit their English and maths targets for next year. David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, said teachers were demoralised by targets, which now worked "more as a threat than a motivator".

Professor Michael Barber, who heads a team of 34 in the Delivery Unit, gave evidence recently to the Commons' Public Administration Committee's inquiry into targets. He did not appear to be enjoying the scrutiny by this newspaper in our regular "Target Watch" reports. When Tony Wright, the chairman, told him, "You are Mr Targets", he replied: "According to The Independent, yes."

The session provided a fascinating insight into Mr Blair's centralised system of government. A "level one" problem would require a "progress chasing" telephone call from Professor Barber to the permanent secretary of the relevant department.

"Level two" is when the Delivery Unit helps the department to solve a problem without an obvious answer. Levels three and four are when the problems are so intractable that the Prime Minister wants to get involved personally. An example of "level three" is the target to limit the waiting time for accident and emergency treatment to a maximum of four hours by December, and the literacy targets.

Street crime was a "level four" last year because the figures were going in the wrong direction. The current "level four" is asylum, the domestic issue causing the Government most grief at present. One cabinet minister told me: "Asylum is a tipping issue, one that could convince people we are no longer competent as a government. That's why it's so important we get a grip."

It is a wonder Mr Blair can devote time to problems such as asylum when he is so focused on Iraq. For good measure, he spent two days in Northern Ireland this week because he judged his presence necessary to push along the stalled peace process.

Although Iraq could seal Mr Blair's fate as Prime Minister, the destiny of the Labour Government will almost certainly rest on the performance of public services. This explains his obsession with delivery. The other reason is that he believes Whitehall departments are painfully slow at turning priorities into action. "There is a 'can't do' culture," one Blair aide said. "The targets may not be perfect but they help us to cut through that attitude. To crank the machine into action, you need benchmarks. Everyone in the private sector has targets."

But the targets regime – even in its new version – means a large degree of "top-down" government. Ministers claim the lesson from Labour's first term is that "command and control" doesn't work, and insist they are committed to decentralisation. But old habits die hard. Ministers use double-speak such as "earned autonomy", meaning public services will win more freedom if they do what the Government wants. The approach may owe more to George Orwell than to Browning.

a.grice@independent.co.uk