Redrawing the map by numbers

In the 1980s Britain went indicator mad. Every institution was subjected to the attentions of managers and auditors compiling new performance indicators to set budgets, measure progress and turn the most mundane activities into numbers. League tables were drawn up for hospital beds or school results; train timetables were turned into targets with performance published in neat bar charts at stations. More perhaps than any other institution, universities lost their innocence as they found themselves judged by a barrage of research rankings and other measures.

No one likes being turned into numbers. But now we can take a slightly more sober look than when indicators seemed nothing more than a tool for bludgeoning lecturers and doctors, refuse collectors and postal workers into submission. One reason for this is that the public does not want indicators pushed back into the cupboard, however ropey the figures. It is not that people believe the numbers. A recent survey for Lancashire Council showed just how little they believe any numbers produced by Government. It is rather that the motives for hiding any figures look suspect.

The second reason for a rethink is more optimistic. An unforeseen side-effects of the Rio environment conference has been a spread of local initiatives on sustainability. Inspired by bodies like the World Bank, which devised a Human Development Indicator, many have put numbers at the centre of their concerns, giving the public what they want to know.

The result has been to transform a new technique for topdown managerial control into a potential tool for democacy. In North America the spread of the indicator movement has led to some bizarre results such as people in rural areas using numbers of salmon in local rivers to measure water quality or publishing the ratio of McDonalds to vegetarian restaurants. Indicators have also become benchmarks by which to judge local administration.

Here in Britain, departments differ in their approach to indicators. The health department has set impressive targets for the health of the nation, and by making health data more public has raised the profile of debates about relative deprivation. Others are wholly resistant: no one, for example, expects the Department of Employment to set targets for cutting unemployment.

Instead the lead in indicators is being taken by ten local authorities, ranging from the Mendips to Merton. They have found a rich public interest in new ways of measuring the world around them. In one area the main concerns are things like air quality (for asthmatics) or disabled access to buildings. In another they want to monitor how easy it is to have a conversation on the high street, and in one London borough it is the number of frogs counted by schoolchildren in a spring census - a good proxy for the health of the local environment.

Universities have not yet engaged in this - although such things as the student guides that rank facilities, night life and rents are a start. Hostility to the last wave of indicators makes people suspicious of yet more numbers. Perhaps there is no way of counting good ideas, memorable phrases, uncovered knowledge. But it should not be beyond the wit of British academia to turn a set of ideas that was used against them into one that could work in their interests.

Geoff Mulgan is director of the think tank, Demos.