Thread by @peterkyle

I’m really, really pleased we’re massively upscaling testing. We’re at about 100k but crucially capacity still looks to be increasing.

As a politician something really fascinates me about how this happened:

What tool did @MattHancock rely on to get here? A ‘target’.

Read on 👇

Hancock said yesterday: “Setting stretching goals has a galvanising effect on everybody involved — it is a mission”

He’s right, but he hasn’t always thought this...

Ever since becoming health secretary, he’s tried to scrap a key target that ‘galvanised’ the NHS response to people facing medical emergency: A&E waiting times.

It’s possible he thinks technical targets are different to social ones?

Labour used targets to ‘galvanise’ energetic responses to social problems, not just technical ones.

Remember this👇?

In the 90’s only about 15% of school leavers went to uni. In 1999 @InstituteGC announced a target of 50%...and it worked.

Other targets covered class sizes, spending on international development, home building, crime reduction and employment.

They have government departments purpose and the public something to judge success or failure by: just as Matt Hancock has seen this month.

Targets galvanised a response but also hardwired social outcomes into policy for the long term.

That’s why successor govts waged war on targets - they shone an uncomfortable light on changed objectives.

Note IDS scrapping child poverty targets before his benefit ‘reforms’

After Labour’s relentless, dogged drive for improvement, investment and reform, the coalition and Tory governments that followed could only change pace and direction if a key tool that made government progress transparent to the public was removed: targets.

It became fashionable among Cameroon’s like @Jeremy_Hunt to attack the ‘culture of targets’ that went before, all the while failing to replace it with something better, more transient, or more effective at delivering results.

And Labour, to our shame, failed to defend our record

The upshot? I really hope @MattHancock and government realise that testing numbers could not have been achieved without the target, and understand why.

If govt had undermined that target it wouldn’t have worked. So rather than undermine the A&E target, reinvigorate it.

Targets aren’t the only way to deliver, they are one tool of many. But it’s foolish to ignore anything that works in an era of great challenge

This week @MattHancock has seen that targets can turn things around: let’s hope he learns the lesson, there’s a lot more to turn around!