It is good to measure what we are doing. Evaluating our assets, our abilities and our behaviour all need good tools and clearly defined standards. Good rules require good measurements and specific definitions. Up to a point…

The case of British Members of Parliament who have charged what appear to be excessive expenses makes the dilemma clear. The Green Book is the House of Commons Guide to what MPs may and may not charge to the taxpayer. It consists of seventy-two pages. Uncharacteristically for a parliamentary document, the English is straightforward and easily understood.

It needs only a cursory reading to see that this document is trying to spell out the rules for every circumstance that may arise. This is necessarily complicated by, among other things, the distance an MP’s constituency is from the House of Commons – his place of work – and the amount of time he must spend away from his home, which may be near neither constituency nor Parliament. A second home is therefore often necessary so that s/he may exercise her or his duties satisfactorily and without excessive exhaustion.

There is a system of advice from an office in Parliament where an MP may ask if such-and-such a claim is valid or not. There are two tiers of appeal systems for those who find the office’s advice unacceptable.

Surely a system developed by experienced clerks and qualified advisors of the legislative centre of the country, must be as near fool-proof as it is possible to get? How is it, then, that so many MPs, including Ministers, are having to repay so much money, and several are resigning from Parliament, sometimes under the threat of withdrawal of the party whip if they do not?

Were seventy-two pages too little space in which to tell a Member of the Mother of Parliaments that he was not expected to rip off the people who had voted for him and over whom he has political control?

My answer to that is that it was seventy-two pages too many. Members of Parliament are supposed to have their fingers on the public’s pulse not in their constituents’ wallets.

The existence of any rule book incites us to find a way round those that don’t suit our purpose. It becomes a game of ‘interpretation’. Every MP so far accused of excessive expenses has chanted the mantra “I have done no wrong. It was within the spirit and the letter of the rules.” And that is the whole point. “Within the letter” maybe; “within the spirit” clearly not. The ‘letter’ of the rules is making a mockery of the ‘spirit’ of trust and example that a citizen is entitled to expect from his legislators.

To make measurement work for us – as opposed to our working for it – requires that we know the measures that are relevant. Increasingly it seems we do not.

Closer to our everyday lives is the case of an English hospital that met its KPIs consistently for several years running but was found, on investigation, to have allowed a large number of patients to die unnecessarily in dirty and disgraceful circumstances. The hospital’s KPIs did not include saving life or making patients tolerably comfortable or clean, it would seem.

But surely that is the purpose of a hospital?

I imagine it was assumed by administrators, with whom the British National Health Service is more than adequately endowed, that hospital management and staff knew these objectives and so it was unnecessary
to include them as KPIs.

Trouble is, as soon as you draw up rules everyone searches for what is missing, as well as for what is there.

So the hospital met its “un-crowded wards” KPI by leaving patients to die on trolleys in corridors without attention, water, food or hygiene. No doubt many other administrative conveniences were fully addressed, too. Hence the excellent KPI record – and the total failure of the hospital.

The existence of rules or KPIs in both these cases worked against the good of those they were supposed to serve. Not all rules are bad; many are essential. The highway would become a battlefield if the rules of the road were not, for the most part, strictly observed. But no highway codes can substitute for attention to careful driving. No books of rules can replace a commonsense view of what the public will, or ought to, accept.

The Ten Commandments were infinitely better rules than the more than nine hundred sins now published as desirably avoided.

That is why trust is so much more important than treatise. But how are we to police that trust? Without the hand of correction, trust will simply be flouted by some at the expense of those who observe it.
Defining the line too clearly between honoured and broken trust is not the way to go. Let each person find the line for himself or herself and let the courts decide if someone has stepped over it. Then let the penalty for a Criminal Breach of Trust be of such deterrence that we all keep well behind the line.

Standards are not only accepted by us, they are set by us. We cannot overnight correct the poor standards that have become widely accepted. But let us begin.