ABSTRACT
The fact that there is a breakdown in the certainties of the structure of central Government (and they were perhaps always suspect), with a proliferation of agencies, trusts, quangos, contractual arangements, aggravates the problem of deciding where the public sector ends and the private begins. There is, surprisingly, difficulty in deciding which parts of the administrative map are clearly ‘Government’ and which are not; which institutions are departments of Government, even who are civil servants. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 1, bodies beyond the mainstream centre are often lumped together under the rather debased label ‘quango’ or its more precise term ‘non-departmental public body’. The fact that there is doubt over ‘Government’ is the starting point for a discussion of the complexities in the relations between Government and the private sector business. If we cannot define Government we have difficulty in recognising its boundaries.
