There is ample evidence that the very existence of government targets distort the systems they aim to observe and therefore provide meaningless data and are a waste of time.

In the recent general election, Tony Blair was confronted by a rare real voter on an ITV panel of swing voters. She told him about her experience with her local GPs practice.

The government target is that a patient should be able to see a GP within 48 hours. In her practice, a patient phoning to make an appointment would get the appointment if one was available within the next 48 hour window. If not, the patient was told to call back tomorrow. By this simple mechanism, the practice meets it's target of all patients getting to see a doctor within 48 hours since those patients are the only ones recorded in their records. Patients who have to wait longer or never get to see a doctor aren't part of the record system.

In Scotland in mid-July of 2005, there was a controversy about the 17,000 or 35,000 patients who were part of a hidden waiting list, some of whom had been waiting for up to five years for an operation.

In Secondary Schools, the League Table position depends on the number of school pupils passing exams. The teachers of the school decide if students can sit the exams. Any student judged likely to fail will be denied the chance to sit the exam. Many pupils who would pass these exams aren't given the chance to try. In this environment, failure isn't an option for the school management. This is a disgraceful betrayal of the nature and purpose of education.

If targets exist, pressure is placed on those in the system to meet the targets. Careers, budgets, survival is dependent on the targets being met. Targets can be met fairly or by various distortions including lying, cheating and fraud. The greater the efforts to impose rigid and detailed targets, the greater the pressure to distort the performance of the system in question.

The recent programme "Trap" on BBC 2 highlighted examples of distortions made to meet targets.

Wheels were taken off hospital trolleys so that they could be reclassified as beds. Corridors were reclassified as wards. Police focus on minor offenses since these arrests keep the numbers up without being time wasting.

In most physical systems, the more the system is studied, the more is known about the system. In the 1920s, Heisenberg identified a conundrum in the study of atomic elements. An electron has two fundamental properties, it's position and it's momentum. Heisenberg concluded that the more is known about the position of an electron, the less is known about it's momentum and vice versa - The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

An identical phenomenon appear to hold with government targets. The more carefully the targets are defined, the greater the concious or unconcious distortion in the system being examined and the less reliance that can be placed on the results.

An equivalent situation exists in sociology. In the 1930s, researchers studying the productivity of workers at a Western General Electric plant in Chicago observed that productivity improved even if there had been no change in the factory environment. In other words, the fact that the workers knew that they were being watched was enough to increase their performance. In sociology, this is known as the Hawthorne Effect.

Targets distort the system they are set up to measure. The measurements are worthless since they don't reflect the real performance of the system.