It’s a shame that Matt Hancock undermined a heroic achievement by massaging the test figures

The health secretary has been attacked for including home testing kits to meet its 100,000 target. A bit of humility might have saved him, but that’s not Hancock’s style

The NHS has increased the number of coronavirus tests eightfold in less than a month, opening up the prospect of a “test, trace and isolate” regime that would allow the economy to go back to something like normal.

Has Matt Hancock, the health secretary, been mobbed (from a safe two-metre distance) by a grateful public for overseeing such a heroic achievement? He has not. He has been assailed from all sides for cheating the figures.

This is a classic case of the anti-politics rage. What matters is the huge increase in testing, and the next steps that it makes possible, yet so many people focus on the secondary question of whether Hancock has exaggerated the scale of the improvement.

When the health secretary set the target of 100,000 tests a day on 2 April, the UK was doing 10,000 tests a day. It was an ambitious target, designed to shock the system into dramatic change. He was attacked for that too, for plucking a figure out of thin air, for promising what he couldn’t deliver, for choosing a less ambitious figure than the 250,000 promised by the prime minister (but without a deadline) and so on.

But it was a good target to set. It was on the edge of what was possible, and it is the sort of figure that might allow an approach modelled on South Korea’s response to control the virus.

Knowing how politicised decisions about the coronavirus response have become, however, a more prudent politician might have taken defensive measures as the deadline approached. He could have said that, on the last day of April, 80,000 tests were known to be completed, and 40,000 more had been posted to be carried out at home. He could have said this was close to the target because in addition to the 80,000 there would have been self-tests carried out with kits previously posted.

A bit of humility might have made what had been achieved seem more impressive. Of course, many of the anti-politics ragers would have declared him a failure anyway, but he might have found it easier to focus attention among the fair-minded on what had been achieved rather than what had not.

That is not Hancock’s style. He is a proud, competitive politician. The urgency with which he pursued his goal provided his critics with plenty of material. It was unorthodox, for example, to use the Conservative Party’s email list of supporters to spread the word about testing. Many of them were surprised to receive a personal message from Hancock inviting anyone with symptoms to have a test if they live in a household with someone over 65 or who cannot work from home.

But “throwing everything at a target” is part of why setting ambitious deadlines is an effective way of driving change in any organisation. Labour supporters in particular ought to be delighted at the evidence that the public sector is able to deliver such a dramatic increase in such a critical national objective.

Sir Michael Barber, who was head of the prime minister’s delivery unit under Tony Blair, was a great advocate of targets in the NHS. His targets of a maximum four-hour wait in A&E and 18 weeks for operations were attacked by the Conservative opposition at the time for “distorting clinical priorities”. He once explained patiently: “The whole point of setting a target is to distort activity.”

Some of that distortion may seem artificial. The number of tests will presumably slip back a bit from yesterday’s peak now the deadline has passed, but we are within days of sustainably carrying out more than 100,000 tests every day.

That is what people should be focusing on, and it is partly Hancock’s own fault that he has drawn attention to presentation rather than substance.