POLITICS
Targets all round in the citizen's Toytown
NOEL MALCOLM
J ust before Mr Major presented his Citizen's Charter to the House of Com- mons on Monday, there was a little knock- about question-and-answer session on the Bank of Credit and Commerce Interna- tional. Everything about it, even the synth- etic fury of Mr Kinnock, was predictable, except for a rather startling complaint from Mr Alex Carlyle, a member of the Euro- friendly Liberal Democratic Party. He wanted to know whether the official in- quiry into the BCCI affair would look into `the Toytown banking authorities of Lux- embourg'. Mr Major was shocked. 'The honourable member's remarks come ill from a party that purports to be strongly European,' he said. 'They will cause great offence, I suspect, in Luxembourg, and perhaps elsewhere as well.'
Where else was he thinking of? Where in the world could anyone possibly be offended by a remark comparing Luxem- bourg to Toytown? There could be only one answer to that: Toytown. At first I thought the Prime Minister was thinking of our diplomatic relations with this small but valued ally (remembering that the Toytown armaments industry contributed almost as much as its Belgian counterpart did to our armed forces during the Gulf war). Then, a few minutes later, copies of the Citizen's Charter arrived and I realised that Mr Major's involvement with Toytown was more intimate than that. He has written a whole booklet about the place.
It is a land full of happy, smiling people in colour photographs. On page 24 there are a happy policeman, a laughing police- woman and three smiling teenagers. Maybe they have just been informed of the pledge on the opposite page: 'We will expect all police forces to set and publish target times for answering telephone calls.' On page 15, in the 'Charter for Tenants' section, there is a picture of three fat men sitting contentedly on a bench. One of them is wearing a T-shirt which says, 'I ran the world'; presumably he is now the one person in the country who is actually willing to run a Housing Action Trust. And on page 20 an attentive `jobseeker' is sitting at a desk being shown a copy of a leaflet entitled 'Just the Job'; photomon- tage has placed this desk on the pavement outside a 'JobCentre', beneath a piece of text which asserts, in bold print, that 'the new integrated network will offer pleasant, well-designed office interiors'.
The toytownisation of government White Papers has been going on for quite a long time, of course. The process was started by Lord Young, who in an odd way is the spiritual godfather of much of this Citizen's Charter. It was he who intro- duced the present mania for dressing up the activities of government as if they were the work of a large corporation with a bottomless budget for public relations ex- perts, image consultants, 'logo' designers and so on. The Citizen's Charter does not quite have a logo, but it does have a symbol called 'the Chartermark', a cross between a pictorial blue plaque and a huge Polo mint, which specially excellent public services will be entitled to display.
Public relations are not to be sneered at; they are a necessary feature of any com- mercial activity which sells goods or ser- vices to ordinary customers. With non- commercial activities which are funded by the taxpayer, it is also a good idea that 'the citizen' should be told what is being done with his money. Throughout the Citizen's Charter, the emphasis is on the publication of standards, the posting up on office walls of promises to do better, the announce- ment of complaints procedures, the release of findings of national customer surveys, and so on.
Some of this frenetic activity will result in higher standards of service, no doubt. But it is all a curious hybrid between non-commercial and commercial activity, between passive acceptance of public scru- tiny and active engagement in PR. It involves setting up a sort of simulacrum of a market, trading in the commodities of blame and praise.
The hybrid notion at the heart of it all is the idea of a 'target'. This is a buzz-word with a very Lord Young-ish sound to it; giving yourself (and publicising) a 'target' to aim at is not quite like being subject to real commercial discipline, and not quite an exercise in PR, but something halfway between the two. Nowadays, whenever the Government wants to sound decisive about something, it talks about targets. We have even been given a target for the number of heart attacks we are allowed to have by the year 2000. Once upon a time targets were related to hard commercial facts: British Rail, for example, was given a series of financial targets which were related to the eventual removal of public subsidies. But what hard facts can possibly determine the `target time' for a police station or a Job-Centre to answer telephone calls? While they are at it, will there also be a target for the number of times the person answering the telephone says, 'Have a nice day'?
Perhaps only the notion of a target is vague enough to be usable across the whole range of what are called here 'the public services'. One of the achievements of the Thatcher years was to make people look afresh at the collection of activities grouped together under that title, and to distinguish more clearly between those which could be run on commercial lines and those which could not. That distinction becomes less clear when all sorts of diffe- rent things — privatised utilities, govern- ment agencies, law courts, local authorities. — are lumped together under a single Charter. In going for a grand omnium- gatherum document of this kind, the Gov- ernment has taken a risk: given that there is widespread dissatisfaction and rumblings of 'something must be done', the gamble is that it will get widespread credit for doing something. But the risk it runs is that the Charter will reinforce the popular impress- ion that all the things listed here are equally the Government's responsibility.
`Look how hard we, the directors of UK • Government plc, are trying to please the customers', it seems to say. 'Look how severely we will deal with those people out there who are failing to please the custom- ers', is what it needs to say a little more loudly.
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