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Performance indicators may be about raising standards of services but they are also about who is in control -Whitehall civil servants or front-line professionals, writes Conrad Russell.

Performance indicators, and the culture of which they are a part, are a problem which certainly is not confined to social work. They have been in the news recently in the health service, in university teaching, and in school examination results. They are a cause of near-universal dissatisfaction to public service professionals who have to work with them. They are, as the current row about GCSE standards illustrates, a source of temptation to those who have to use them. There is a sense in Goodhart's Law (invented by Professor Charles Goodhart, formerly of the Monetary Policy Committee) that the more any figure is relied on as an indicator, the less use it is in understanding what is happening.

It perhaps helps if we raise our noses from our own professional grindstones, and examine the issue as a constitutional problem. What rapidly emerges is that the issue is about power. The question is whether it is public service professionals or Whitehall civil servants who decide what is good practice in services in which the professionals are qualified, and Whitehall is not. The civil service is a profession in which it is possible to get blame, but not praise, and in any devolved relationship with a public service, Whitehall is haunted by the fear that civil servants may be held accountable for some lapse in standards over which they had no control.

Performance indicators also rest on the assumption that good practice is the same in all cases. It is not. Most of the best teaching I received, and I believe also some of the best I have done, resulted from deliberate rejection of the conventional indicators for the sake of the end for which the job is done. I remember interviewing an idle undergraduate at the beginning of his second year. I was, I think, expected to recommend that he be sent down. Instead, I told him he could get a first if he thought it was worth bothering - and he did! Under performance indicators, I would have been guilty of a dereliction of duty.

Performance indicators constantly conflict with each other. The speed with which a review of child protection cases is done may easily conflict with the accuracy and care with which it is done. Exclusive concentration on indicators means losing sight of the purpose for which the whole operation is being done. This also means leaving out any recognition of the fact that what is good practice in one case may be very bad practice in another. In social work, this is likely to be of peculiar importance. It is no use saying that indicators must not be over-interpreted. It is of their very nature that they will be over-interpreted. They are all that Whitehall will know when it reviews a local authority's standard of service. It is no good saying it is necessary to take account of quality as well as quantity. It is impossible to take statistics about quality, so it will not appear in Whitehall's calculations. Again, what is emphasised is that this is a struggle about power. Is the service to be controlled by those who know how to do it, or by someone in Whitehall?

Replies to all this will be cast in terms of accountability. These replies deserve answers. Accountability on one level is something which must always be required of recipients of public money. It must be spent on the objects for which it is given, honestly, transparently, and on causes which people are ready to justify to their peers. It is when government decides to "improve" a service that the problems begin, for it does not know what "improvement" may mean in a given context. That is why it plays safe and relies on all these figures instead.

The need to save money will always be part of the case for performance indicators. That is a perfectly proper need, but fixed budgets make most of us aware enough of that need already. When we get to the point that was reached in 1640, when soldiers were made to pay out of their own wages for any powder used in firing their weapons, the only people likely to be satisfied are the enemy. Only people doing the job can decide what is actually necessary to be spent. Between that decision and Whitehall's perfectly proper decision about how much money can be made available, there must be perpetual negotiation.

In deciding how much can be available, Whitehall must be supreme. In deciding what the money will and will not buy, professionals must be supreme. It is one of the biggest dangers of performance indicators that they are used as whipping posts to blame social workers and other public service professionals for not doing what they could never have afforded to do.

Conrad Russell is Liberal Democrat social security spokesperson and professor of British history, Kings College, London.