Just as with public financial reporting, performance reporting is here to stay. Just as with financial reporting, it will never be entirely free of controversy. If, as seems to be the case, performance reporting is going to continue to be an important element of our political and managerial systems in the public domain, we need to start thinking about how to make it as consensual and useful as we can.

Government by numbers has always to some extent been with us. After the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, the new overloads created the Doomsday book just so they could count what it was exactly they now owned.

But the use of numbers goes much further. Governments – even autocratic ones – have always sought to trumpet their achievements through measurement. They boast about how many roads they’ve built, how big the dams are they’ve constructed, how many children they have educated and above all how well the economy has grown under their guidance. Especially since the middle of the 19th century, in the West at least, there has been an explosion of measuring social “facts” like population, disease, education, crime, trade, inflation, economic growth and other socio-economic indicators.

More recently, roughly since the 1990s, there has been an explosion in measuring the activities and results of public institutions: organizations, programs and even governments themselves (e.g., the World Bank’s “governance” indicators).

This “performance movement,” as some have called it, is wide and deep. Wide in that it has spread across many different countries with often vastly differing administrative traditions, and deep in that in some countries, like the U.K., it has penetrated almost every aspect of public activity and gone on for two decades or more.

I have argued elsewhere that this movement is very unlikely to fade away; the performance reporting “genie” is out of the bottle and won’t be put back in, even if it changes. The Coalition government that was formed in Britain in 2010 appeared to be committed to trying to do just that, but analysis of their Departmental Business Plans shows that they have if anything more targets, milestones and measurements than their predecessors.

Needed improvement
So, whatever the criticisms of the “performance movement” (and there are many, some justified, others less so) it is not going to go away. The real issue is how do we improve it, make it work better and to what end?

At the heart of whatever use performance reporting is put to – policymaking, management, citizen-choice, accountability – must lie the issue of validity and reliability of measurements. What standards of accuracy and appropriateness should we have and who should determine and monitor them?

The parallel I would draw here is with public finance, especially spending. Over the past century or more we have steadily evolved methods of accounting for public money that are fairly consensual in most advanced democracies. Moreover accounting standards have become increasingly international. In most emerging economies the issue is not what standards are needed to measure and report on public spending, but how to achieve the right levels of accuracy and appropriateness. Of course, there are still many debates about some specifics of how to measure, budget and report on public finances but there is a large degree of consensus about basic counting practices. There are bigger debates about what to do with the information once we have it, but these are precisely to be expected.

Uniform standards
The idea I floated recently in Britain in a White Paper was that we could evolve similar reporting standards for public sector performance and efficiency reporting.

In my recent book on Theories of Performance, I pointed out that although there are some commonly used concepts within the performance movement, such “performance” itself, “efficiency,” “outputs,” “outcomes,” “productivity,” “value for money,” etc, the definitions of these terms varied both within and across jurisdictions.

A useful starting point therefore would be to get some consensus on what we mean by these general terms and enforce their adoption in public agencies. An attempt was made to do the first part of this back in 2001 in the U.K. when HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, National Audit Office, Audit Commission and Office for National Statistics jointly published a booklet called “Choosing the Right FABRIC – a framework for performance information,” which included a set of agreed definitions.

Unfortunately, with no one to police this new framework, the use of these standards concepts soon broke down, with HM Treasury itself leading the way to misuse of the terminology upon which it had just agreed. But the fact it could happen at all showed it was possible.

The UK National Audit Office, to be fair, has tried in various ways to introduce more standard use of terms through its “value for money” reports over the past 20 years, but it seems to have had little impact on central government departments and agencies, who continue to adopt a cavalier attitude to defining performance reporting, especially when reporting so-called “efficiency” savings.

So there is a strong case for developing what I’ve called Generally Accepted Reporting Standards for Public Performance, or GARSPP. In my view we have sufficient experience now of reporting the performance of public agencies and programs to develop such agreed standards, even if at first they are in the form of broad principles and definitions.

Establishing such standards would be a process rather than an event. It would take time to get even an initial framework established, and it would undoubtedly evolve over time and never reach an end point. It would probably be subject to some controversy; indeed it would be a bad sign if it wasn’t because lack of debate would mean it wasn’t very important. But a process of gradually creating greater areas of agreement and consensus, and narrowing the areas of controversy, seems perfectly feasible.

Who should be responsible for developing such standards? Clearly it would need to be a body that could command respect for its technical competence and independence from direct political interference, and be able to draw together political, expert and managerial stakeholders to build a consensus. In some jurisdictions this might be a role for a supreme audit body or a Congressional or Parliamentary Budget Office perhaps? In others, especially federal systems, it might be necessary to create a special body specifically with the remit to create and police such standards.

Whoever it is, it needs to be someone other than the government of the day and its civil service or, as in the U.K. case, standards would be rapidly politicized.

Dr. Colin Talbot is professor of government at the University of Manchester and director of Policy@Manchester. He has researched and advised on issues of performance reporting to many public organizations and governments, including Treasury Board of Canada.