Sir Suma Chakrabarti, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, wrote an interesting essay for @Reformthinktank’s new publication, the Next Ten Years, on targets and transparency. An edited version appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. He traces the development of the target culture under the last Labour administration and how it led to Public Service Agreements before going on to discuss the “new religion” of transparency. Sir Suma summarises that the principle behind transparency is simple – put the data out there and let the public ask difficult questions, forcing public service managers to improve their performance. He is particularly interested in using data on the performance of different courts to put under-performers under the spotlight. Interestingly, he announces that later this year the MoJ will link justice outcomes to the reported crime maps on the police.uk website. He touches on

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