Policy Briefing: How Data Churn Destroys Evidence about Public Service Performance

DPIR’s latest Policy Briefing examines: ‘How Data Churn Destroys Evidence about Public Service Performance and What Can be Done about It’.

Research by Ruth Dixon and Christopher Hood sets out the contradiction between the demand for quantitative evidence in public management policy in the UK and the increasingly frequent breaks and discontinuities in the data series that are meant to provide that evidence.

This Policy Briefing explores the impacts, causes and explanations of performance data breaks and examines the implications for those producing and evaluating performance data, inside and outside government.  The paper proposes three changes that could be made to reconcile the demand for evidence with the demand for indicator change.

You can download the paper by clicking on this thumbnail:

This paper is based on Chapter Three of Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon’s new book, A Government that worked Better and Cost Less? Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government published by Oxford University Press in April 2015.