Targets and the Quest for Political Trust: Performance Targets in UK Immigration Policy

This paper explores the emergence of performance measurement - and especially the use of targets - as an attempt to produce political trust. It explores how targets on immigration and asylum and the UK have emerged as a self-imposed mechanism of accountability, one that promises to ground trust in two ways: first, by establishing a robust form of 'lock-in', thereby signalling government commitment to particular goals; and second, by providing data for vouchsafing that incumbents have achieved specified outcomes. The paper considers how far the use of targets in immigration policy has succeeded in producing trust, by comparing two particularly high profile targets: the 2002 Labour target on halving asylum applications, and the 2010 net migration target. An analysis of press coverage in 11 daily newspapers suggests that - at least in media coverage - targets failed to produce trust. On the one hand, they normalised the idea that policy goals and assessment should be framed in quantitative terms. But at the same time, the findings suggest that decisions on bestowing trust are far more likely to be based on symbolic cues about the integrity of authenticity of politicians and the party's perceived 'track record' than on 'objective' measurements of performance. This produces a paradox: a rhetorical or ritualistic attachment to the idea that targets are an authoritative mode of holding government to account; combined with disdain or scepticism about the authority of such targets in practice.