Monday, 1 August 2011

Counting speeches

Measuring the performance of people in roles can be a difficult task sometimes.  Lots of organisations end up targeting their managers and staff against those things which can be defined and measured rather than those which are more important but difficult to measure. 
It’s an aspect of the way targets are set in the public sector which worries me.  As an example, targeting schools on exam performance may well lead to improvement in exam results, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us whether the education has improved.  Training pupils to pass exams is not the same as educating them.  Politicians, though, love targets (or at least, they love the ones that they can hit – they tend to want to forget about the other ones).
Some of them even try to measure their own performance – or more usually, the performance of opponents – by turning to simplistic counts.  Hence, last week, we had the story about the lack of speeches made to the House of Commons by Peter Hain.  As with a lot of other things which can be measured, I’m not sure that, in itself, it tells us a great deal about how effective he is, or isn’t, as an MP.
Some MPs have become little more than problem advice centres.  It’s a useful role, but whether it’s the right role for elected politicians is another question.  Some of those try to ‘count’ their casework in order to impress us with how hard-working they are.  The late Sir Raymond Gower used to include in his election address a figure (always many thousands) for the number of letters he’d written.  (I had my first personal letter from him at the age of 11, to congratulate me on passing my cycling proficiency test.)  Certainly, people seemed to like this approach, but what did it actually tell me about his effectiveness as an MP?
Others go for the voting record, proud to tell us how many times they’ve voted out of the possible total number of opportunities.  But unless it’s an issue on which there are significant numbers of MPs voting contrary to the party whip, how useful is voting?  For most votes in the House of Commons, they might as well just have the whips present, and allow them to cast an appropriate number of votes on behalf of their parties.  A bit like the card votes at Labour conferences in the days when conferences were allowed to vote.
Yet others count the number of hours they put in.  I don’t doubt that many MPs do indeed put in very long hours (even deducting the time attending dinners, receptions etc which I’m not really convinced can be counted as ‘work’), but as a lot of people in other walks of life will understand from observation of those around them, merely putting in long hours is no guarantee of effectiveness.
The job is pretty poorly defined, and the role of individual MPs in the legislative process is largely one of doing as they are told.  There are a few who manage to carve out a role for themselves as campaigners on specific issues (Adam Price comes to mind) or as mavericks, willing to say what they think whether their party bosses like it or not (such as Paul Flynn), but they are much more the exception these days then they were a few decades ago.
Perhaps the problem is that we don’t define in enough detail what we want of them, and then like to criticise when they don’t deliver on it.  I’m not sure that the effectiveness of the contribution of a legislator is actually amenable to anything as crude as measurement; it’s more subtle than that.  When we do come to judge our elected representatives, there’s surely more to it than counting the number of speeches that they’ve made to an empty House.


Anonymous said...

Isn't there something a little bit odd about a Nationalist MP claiming that a Labour MP isn't as completely bound up in the pointless processes of the Westminster Parliament as he is? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Peter D Cox said...

A small, albeit belated comment: you correctly say there are no job descriptions for MP's. The same applies to AMs and councillors. No other kind of profession (?) could survive without this simple measure for performance.
Why do we allow this?

John Dixon said...


The clue may be in your question mark after the word profession! Since most votes are probably cast on the basis of party rather than candidate, I'd suggest that the only people who could meaningfully attempt to measure performance would be the parties.

It's not a problem free approach though, which I guess is why parties steer away from it. Given the tendency for politicians to believe that it's their personal characteristics and abilities which got them elected, they tend not to take well to the idea that someone else should be assessing their performance. And, thinking about it, that isn't an attitude limited to politicians. The people at the 'top' of any structure almost invariably believe that they're there because they're the best, don't they?