A FEW years ago John Major said he wanted to create a nation at ease with
itself. If he was still Britain鈥檚 Prime Minister such an idea would never make
it off the political drawing board these days鈥攗nless, that is, someone
invented a way of measuring national ease on a numerical scale, so that targets
could be set for improving it.
In the corridors of power, vague aspirations are out; newfangled numerical
indicators are in. All over the world, policy makers and their advisers are
trying to expand the range of statistics governments use to evaluate the
prosperity and wellbeing of nations. In most cases, the aim is simply to put
figures on things such as rates of forest depletion, carbon dioxide emissions
and the amount of chemical pesticide being dumped on farmland. But Britain is
going further. It wants to introduce a set of FTSE-style index numbers that
encapsulate not just the economic impact of individual harmful or polluting
activities, but the actual state of the nation鈥檚 air, water and countryside
(see p 18).
Politicians have relied for far too long on limited economic indicators such
as GDP. So shouldn鈥檛 we rejoice at the news? Not yet: nobody has established
that the job can really be done鈥攁t least not in the way the government
wants, using only a handful of 鈥渉eadline indicators鈥� that everyone can
grasp.
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The first problem is how to set about selecting such indicators. People might
agree that air quality should be on the list. But should the government base its
index on specific pollutants鈥攁nd if so, which ones? Or should it take its
cue from the incidence of respiratory disease?
Transport also affects the quality of everyone鈥檚 life, but again it鈥檚 not
obvious where the simple barometric index the government craves will come from.
How about a figure based on the average number of miles people drive per year?
That would be easy enough to understand. The downside is that it wouldn鈥檛
capture the underlying pressures that cause people to drive more, like the fear
of traffic accidents and crime that makes parents so reluctant to let their
children walk to school.
There is a deeper problem, too. The indicators are supposed to guide Britain
towards sustainable development, but the worrying fact is that there has been no
attempt to define what the country needs to do to become sustainable. As a
result the indicators we end up with may seem arbitrary.
And, of course, the more arbitrary it all looks, the more cynical people will
become about political interference. The government has plans for a massive
house-building programme. How will its ambitions in this direction affect the
choice of headline indicators?
It would cost little鈥攁nd do wonders for public acceptance鈥攖o set
up an independent panel to keep tabs on things. And there is one extra indicator
to be added to the list鈥攁 number reflecting the degree of confidence the
public has in government statistics.
