NHS Reporting, Insights, Publications & Transparency Programme

Performance dashboards in the public sector do not arrive without genealogy. As Leoni (2022) documents, the importance attached to data in public governance "might be the result of a longstanding political discourse that proposed, as part of a narrative of positive change, data as the centre of ideal and innovative models of government and governance meant to change the relationship between the public sector and citizens". The public sector's investment in data long predates the digital era - Leoni notes that it "has a long tradition of large-scale data collection, going as far as the birth of the modern State" - but the ideological charge attached to that investment has intensified with each successive wave of administrative reform. New Public Management, which reshaped public administration across Europe and beyond from the 1980s onwards, "heavily relies on performance indicators and targets", affecting "all corners of the public sector, from local to European and from policy formulation to management practice" (Van Thiel & Ongaro, 2017). As Pedersen and Ferlie (2016) observe, the rise of performance measurement alongside NPM "changed the notion of accountability, focusing attention on the managerial aspects of public service delivery". Shore and Wright (2024) characterise the result as an audit culture: a mode of governance that has "proliferated and radically transformed organisations" while being "typically portrayed as [an] objective instrument for promoting trust, accountability, transparency, and good governance".