ESRC Public Services Programme Policy Briefing Paper `Managing by Numbers` featured in FT

A policy briefing paper entitled Managing by Numbers: the Way to Make Public Services Better? by Professor Christopher Hood, Dr Ruth Dixon and Dr Deborah Wilson has been featured in an article by Nick Timmins in the Financial Times. The policy briefing includes research findings from a wide range of Public Service Programme projects.

As Nick Timmins puts it, The use of targets and league tables in public services, and the whole panoply of audit and inspection, will come under growing pressure as public spending faces its fiercest squeeze in decades, a study by leading academics said on Monday ... Targets, performance indicators and rankings do have a role in public management ... but such measurements need to be used more intelligently.

The policy briefing paper may be viewed as a pdf: http://www.publicservices.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/policy-briefing-nov2009.pdf

Christopher Hood is Gladstone Professor of Government, Director of the ESRC Public Services Programme on Quality, Performance and Delivery and Fellow, All Souls College; Deborah Wilson is Deputy Director of the Programme and Senior Research Fellow, CMPO, University of Bristol; Ruth Dixon is Project Assistant to the Programme Director.