The government has quietly taken steps to lower its performance standards.

Our investigative reporter unearthed this unannounced change after hearing Constitutional Affairs Secretary Lord Falconer say that although the June 1st deadline for sending out ballot papers for postal voting trials for next week's local and European elections would be missed, the trials are still "something of a success". This admission follows a recent announcement by the National Audit Office that asylum figures are "in most respects reliable".

Challenged by our reporter to explain this apparent trend towards reporting that everything is going well, sort of, government spokesman Douglas Ramsbottom said that it was intended only to facilitate the compilation of statistics on performance targets. "We set the performance standards too high," he said, "so this is just by way of an adjustment to them. All government programmes and services are on track. More or less."

He explained that there is always some slippage in delivering the programmes and services, but that bald statements based on statistics to the effect that something was not meeting its performance standards tended to me misconstrued. "I mean, just because, say, the NHS is not fully delivering on reducing waiting times doesn't mean it's not delivering anything at all," he said. "So by lowering standards a bit we're just making it easier to show people that there's generally nothing much to worry about, by and large."

Home Secretary David Blunkett is understood to be very excited by this new "fuzzy" approach, and is said to be developing ideas for how it could be introduced into sentencing. A Home Office spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr Blunkett believes that by replacing fixed sentences with fuzzy ones, such as "you are sentenced to something like twenty years", it would make it easier to keep criminals and other assorted riff-raff off the streets by giving prison officials more leeway in interpreting sentence lengths.

Michael "I believe" Howard, the current interim leader of the Conservative Party, was not available for comment as, according to an aide, he was busy painting "Drop the 2p tax increase" signs in preparation for a street protest against high petrol prices.

6th June 2004

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