A dashboard to plot the course of the Netherlands

Publication | 11-01-2025

“Resist the urge to stare at your bonnet. If you look further ahead, you can respond calmly to whatever’s coming up. And you’ll still see if any surprises are in store close by.” A policeman once told me this when I, a teenager, asked him how he managed to drive at high speed without crashing. I have always remembered his advice, even though my young adult children unanimously claim that I am an embarrassingly bad car driver.

I do know how to sail a boat, though, and the focus you need is not entirely different. You set a course to a far-off destination using waypoints or buoys. By navigating both further ahead and close to hand, you can see where you are going and know whether or not you are on course. It stops you being taken by surprise and having to yank on the tiller to reset the course.

Politics is not all that different, but distant goals often seem to be overlooked if not completely ignored. To give three 3 examples.

The Court of Audit investigated the reception costs incurred for asylum seekers. We found that they had been underestimated in 21 out of 23 years. Year in, year out, the budget was overtaken by events and reception services were repeatedly being upscaled and downscaled. Yet emergency places are more expensive than regular places. Asylum reception is chaotic and getting more expensive all the time. It is currently “in crisis”.

And what about Ministry of Defence? For many years, it invested less than internationally agreed. The ministry thought it could navigate this course long and happily. But it slowly started drifting and realised only a yank on the tiller would put it back on course. The ministry increased expenditure so fast that the industry, military personnel and procurement procedures could barely keep pace. The sails were too big for the ship!

A final example, the initial signs of a nitrogen problem in the Netherlands were seen back in the 1980s. Farms and factories were discharging too much. The Court of Audit published the first in a series of reports setting out the facts on manure surpluses in 1990. It was followed by many more reports, action plans and parliamentary debates. Decades later, we are “in crisis”.

Long term/short term, wide thinking/narrow thinking. I have been drawing attention to these dichotomies ever since I became President of the Court of Audit. It is the surest way to get results for citizens and businesses. If you take the results seriously, you can use the goals to discuss whether or not you are on course and make improvements where necessary.

The first part of this essay looks at three features of our national financial management that encourage short-term thinking. The second considers the importance of goals in order to know the direction of travel, and the third asks how political goals can be applied to achieve results for the Netherlands.

Financial management disincentives

If I look at the government’s financial management, I can see roughly three political disincentives that lead to poor insight into results. 
Firstly, our government is one of the few in Europe that is still working with a cash accounting system. This has a major drawback: financially, it is living from day to day. Budgets can be balanced quickly by moving money from one account to another. It is a bit like students with their cashbooks, with lots of short-term disincentives.

Cash accounting is not customary in business. Businesses use balance sheets and recognise the difference between costs and investments, depreciate capital expenditure and form maintenance and replacement provisions. The impact of cash accounting on our roads, viaducts and bridges is plain to see. The Court of Audit has been warning about the pitfalls of poor maintenance for the past 10 years or so. Rijkswaterstaat says maintenance projects need funding but it is more concerned with new construction work. We are now reaching the point at which some bridges will soon have to be taken out of service. This comes as no surprise.

Compartmentalisation

The second disincentive to wide thinking is that budgets are allocated to individual ministries. Money spent on retraining programmes, for instance, is a cost to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, but the benefits, such as fewer welfare payments and lower unemployment, are not credited to the Ministries of Social Affairs or Economic Affairs. This is not wide thinking, but narrow, compartmentalised thinking.

The same disincentive can be heard in the House’s budget debates in the months following Budget Day. The fact that each ministry and parliamentary committee has its own budget means there is a risk of thinking in terms of discrete policy fields. “Not me, not me!” echoes round the chamber when economies have to be made. The opposite is heard when investments are on the table: “Me, me, me!” This is an incentive to narrow, self-centred thinking. The wider look to the future is lost.

Long-term effects

Thirdly, what do we see when we zoom out to the costs and benefits? Government and election programmes invariably recognise education spending as a cost, not as a beneficial investment. It is accounted for in the same way as welfare payments, civil servant salaries and office supplies. Yet education is the bedrock of prosperity and personal wellbeing.

In 2023, the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to investigate the relationship between education and wellbeing, with particular regard to criminality. It concluded, “A long education reduces crime”. This is a very pertinent finding but not acknowledging it diminishes the government’s understanding of the effect that cutting education spending will have. Similarly, cutting health expenditure as a quick fix to balance a budget can exert even more pressure on health expenditure in the longer term. This is akin to sailing backwards.

The benefits of expenditure are usually calculated in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). GDP is a measure of the total size of the economy. It embraces a lot, but leaves out lots of things we think are important, such as wellbeing. My third point is that we should make a better distinction between costs on the one hand and investments that have a long-term social impact on the other. Taking a wider look at wellbeing promotes the achievement of policy goals.

Clear goals, please!

Dick Schoof’s government presented its first budget last September. My expectations were high, if only because MPs from the left and the right had been trimming their sails and asking the new coalition for “clear goals, please”, ones that they could track and trace. A good point if you want to navigate.

If a government cuts or increases spending, specific, measurable and time-bound goals are a precondition to understand what results are being achieved and where. Clear goals are also anchor points to discuss the route ahead and improve policy. In addition, MPs have a right to scrutinise the government’s revenue and expenditure. Budgets should therefore be firmly underpinned and auditable. It is important to know not only how much something costs but also what the money is being spent on and why.

Ambitions too abstract

The Court of Audit has analysed the Schoof government’s financial plans and found that the financial positon of the various budgets was in order. The goals, however, were often abstract. The goal to build 100,000 homes a year is crystal clear but there are also vague objectives such as “safer society with the aid of an efficient police force”. What does this mean? How will we know if the policy has been a success? The goal should be more specific. You don’t give a kitchen fitter a bag of money and simply say, “Build me something I’ll like”.

The Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), the Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) and the Institute for Social Research (SCP) have also analysed the coalition programme. They concluded that goals that promoted wellbeing “at some point in the future”, such as improving the standard of education, restoring nature and reducing health differences, needed to be worked out in more detail before their feasibility could be assessed. They also thought the new coalition’s plans paid too little attention to the long term. The government’s planning priorities were in the here and now at the expense of future wellbeing.

As President of the Netherlands Court of Audit, I detect a wider pattern here. The government does not set enough clear goals and does not question whether its ambitions are feasible. Even if funding is available, plans can come unstuck if regulations are too complex or if there are not enough people to get the job done. The government will not deliver on its promises if its ambitions are too high.

Not everything can be measured

I worked as an auditor and financial manager in industry for many years. I had to make investment decisions and post-investment evaluations, prepare budgets, compile progress reports, quarterly reports, annual reports and management reviews, and make adapt to circumstances. Results were the be all and end all. I am aware that a company is not the same as a government. The political setting is complicated and dynamic. The world is too volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, in other words, too chaotic to plan everything to the finest detail.

There are many examples of what the government can do well and how it responds to contingencies. Following the energy shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the government took measures so that citizens and businesses could pay their energy bills. The Court of Audit concluded that the Minister for Climate and Energy Policy responded proactively and decisively to the energy crisis, despite the time pressure.

Not everything is makeable and measureable. Fortunately it doesn’t have to be. To plot a course for the Netherlands, goals have to be set on the horizon. This demands more than just a clinical calculation. There has to be a story and a discussion about policy and practice. An account of what’s going well and what isn’t. 

Trust in politics

On 30 December, the SCP published a study on what people think about politics. It found that trust had risen during the elections and on the announcement of the new government but fallen during the coalition’s formation. Frustration about political outcomes and how they were achieved dominated public opinion. The mood was more sombre than it had been in the previous 15 years. People wanted politicians to solve problems. The SCP saw this in such sentiments as, “Sort the country out”, “Get to work”, “Less talk, more action”, “Solve problems, stop creating new ones”.

In the final analysis, you earn trust by doing what you say you will do. That is why goals and results have my special attention. In my opinion, improving them is the Court of Audit’s raison d’être. Through our audits, we independently check the government’s revenue and expenditure and look at how public money is spent. We dissect political promises, analyse annual accounts and travel the length and breadth of the country to see what is being achieved. We are a money and results-based track & trace system for citizens and businesses.

Results Day

The government makes appealing and persuasive political promises every year on the third Tuesday of September, Budget Day. It’s quite rightly a jubilant and important day. It is bewildering that there is so little interest in Accountability Day, the day we present the policy outcomes. On that third Wednesday in May, the Court of Audit reveals all its findings on the 450 billion euros the government spends. Are the goals in sight? Have the policies and budgets improved life in the Netherlands? 

A more equitable balance has to be struck between plans and outcomes. At present, it’s as though the champagne is uncorked as soon as a quotation for a new kitchen is received. Shouldn’t the bottle be left in the cellar until the kitchen has been built, on budget, on time and on plan? 

We can eliminate some of this disincentive relatively easily by turning Accountability Day into Results Day – a celebration of democracy. A day to honour success and contemplate improvements. Together, we must take a critical look at where changes have to be made, with optimism for the future, a little champagne and, who knows, maybe a dash of Orange. This would strike a better balance between promises and results.

Setting goals, monitoring results

Like the Court of Audit, politicians scrutinise public money, policies and results. At the start of each term of office, the government could select a set of key performance indicators that align with its priorities, cover the main expenditure categories, take account of long and short-term goals and in any event continue to be measured throughout the government’s term. They would provide an insight into the government’s progress, regardless of the specific roles and responsibilities of individual ministers.

The selection doesn’t have to cover all the government’s activities. It’s actually better if it doesn’t. And it doesn’t have to be watertight at the outset, just as plausible as possible.

New Zealand, for example, has been working on the development of wellbeing since 2011. It measures a wide range of aspects and displays them on a dashboard for public debate. When proposing new spending plans, ministers have to demonstrate how they will promote the government’s priorities, both inside and outside their own policy fields. This prevents the compartmentalisation of policy.

An example closer to home is the monitoring of the National Programme Rotterdam South (NPRZ). The national government, municipality, housing associations, care institutions, schools, businesses, politicians and the Public Prosecution Service are working together on the future of Rotterdam South. The goal is to raise the standard of education, labour participation and housing quality to the average of the four largest cities in the Netherlands within 20 years. NPRZ monitors interventions and progress and reports on them in detail every year.

Top 5 worldwide

Could central government apply such a dashboard? Artificial intelligence would quickly produce a very useful dashboard if it was used to analyse the coalition programme, the Budget Memorandum, the budget chapters, Statistics Netherlands’ Wellbeing Monitor and some stakeholder surveys such as NL2025’s On Behalf of the Netherlands and the SCP’s Citizen Perspectives surveys.

Let me look at an example in a little more detail. The coalition programme states, “This government has the ambition to return the Netherlands to the top 5 most competitive countries in the world. This is a long haul but we will lay the foundations in the current term of office”. “A long haul” is not exactly a measurable goal but now that the Netherlands has fallen to ninth place I assume it is a long-term goal. To achieve it, the government is planning to reduce the regulatory burden, create physical space for the economy, strengthen economic competitiveness and resilience, and stimulate innovation in the economy.

The coalition programme continues with a series of secondary goals. For example, the government wants all the provinces in the Netherlands to be among the top 30 most competitive regions in Europe by 2023, with 6 in the top 10. The coalition programme also states that financial resources will be provided to achieve the goals on each of the priorities. On the whole, with a little refinement these goals can be measured and included in a dashboard. Progress and delays will then be on display.

Common learning culture

A goal might eventually prove unattainable, of course. Is that a weakness? Not as far as I’m concerned. It’s an opening for a fundamental discussion of how to improve policies and budgets. What’s possible and what isn’t. By adapting plans or overcoming hindrances and rules. It’s a first step to discuss the course that lies ahead.

This calls for a political culture that does not immediately blame ministers but lets them learn from what went wrong. This is not possible without a cultural change. 

When I speak to members of the House, I advise them to use goals to identify where improvements can be made. This is an open-ended quest to name both the things that are not going well and the things that are. This is the only course to a learning culture and it is confirmed by our audits: people learn through the open discussion of failures and the celebration of successes. Thinking that failure is a failing is not conducive to a learning culture.

Keeping the Netherlands on course

In the end, it is not for me to decide what the dashboard should look like. That’s a matter for the government, with the House of Representatives and the Senate having the final word. As a Dutch citizen, taxpayer and President of the Court of Audit, however, I’m interested in the goals, plans and money and I like to know how they are performing.

I believe tax money should be put to the best possible use. And that you can manage by results and hold an open discourse based on goals. In both the short and the long term. For instance with a dashboard so the government can show the progress it is making with its policies.

This takes courage. It also means looking further than the accounting records, wide thinking instead of narrow, and valuing some costs as forward-leaning investments. In combination with the intangible wellbeing of citizens and businesses, replacing a blame culture with a common learning culture would considerably improve our national financial management. It would also prevent politicians going round in circles and seeing only their own feet.

I can’t help thinking about what that policeman said about driving his car at top speed, “Resist the urge to stare at your bonnet. If you look further ahead, you can respond calmly to whatever’s coming up. And you’ll still see if any surprises are in store close by.” In my own words, clear long-term goals are the shortest route to success.

This article was published on EWmagazine.nl on Monday, 6 January 2025.