Less is more / Guardian, 4 July 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/04/public.service.agreements?gusrc=rss&feed=politics
Jane Dudman
"Originally, there were hundreds of PSAs, but last year the government began rowing sharply backwards from the piles of specific targets involved. There are now just 30 PSAs and the measures of success have become vaguer. "It's about learning lessons," said Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary of the Treasury. "Now, we want to focus much more on implementation drive at the local level. This is a new phase and we need to reduce targets substantially." What Cooper didn't say is that PSAs have had to be changed in part because the targets involved weren't linked by the Treasury to actual performance. So departments could fail to meet their PSA targets but still receive their budgets, as allocated under the comprehensive spending review."