Preface

How can people be confident that they receive high quality public services in return for their taxes? How can service providers compare their performance with others and encourage a culture of continuous improvement? How can governments be sure that public services are effective, efficient and equitably provided? These are big questions and there is nothing that will guarantee high quality public services; people who claim otherwise are peddling snake oil. These questions are important whether public services are centrally managed and financed, or subject to local control. Whichever way public services are provided, some form of performance measurement is inevitable and, done properly, can be extremely valuable. Performance measurement per se is neither good nor bad. It can be done well or poorly. It can provide useful information and support innovation and development, or it can become part of heavy-handed central control that stifles development.

In this book I argue that performance measurement is a vital part of any systematic attempt to continually improve public services. It is certainly not the only part, but without it, how can any stakeholders have a reasonable idea of how well these services are provided? It is a mistake to assume that measurement is only appropriate to particular forms of public management. Many have argued that it is a core element of what has become known as the New Public Management (NPM). However, many public bodies attempted to measure aspects of their performance long before the ideas of NPM appeared. How can agencies know how well they are doing unless they attempt to find out and do so in a systematic way?