ABSTRACT
As the interventionist role, and thus size, of central Government grew in Britain – as in the rest of the Western world – from the late nineteenth century, so it faced three specifi c challenges. How, given market failure, was it to acquire the expertise to inform its intervention? Second, how was such expertise to be translated into policies that were compatible, practicable and democratically acceptable (the challenge of ‘administration’)? Finally, how were those policies to be delivered cost-effectively by an ever larger and more diverse bureaucracy (the challenge of ‘management’)? The 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report was widely perceived to have defi nitively answered the second question, albeit for a ‘night-watchman’ state. Then, during the interwar period, a bowdlerised version had underpinned the fi rst era of sustained intervention – arguably a ‘golden age’ of public administration, in which the British Civil Service consolidated its reputation as the ‘best in the world’. Unlike many of its international counterparts, it remained fi nancially and politically incorrupt. Despite much obloquy (both at the time and since), it also delivered cost-effective mass programmes of social relief whilst simultaneously providing an example of a ‘model employer’ to the private sector. The Second World War, as for so much else in Britain, was its fi nest hour. However, in the best traditions of Greek tragedy (as, given their education, many senior offi cials may have well appreciated) the War was a moment of hubris. With the establishment of the welfare state and the adoption of Keynesian demand management, the role and size of Government fundamentally changed. However, its organisation – and, more importantly, the constitutional context within which it worked – did not. This made it all the more urgent to resolve the two challenges upon which Northcote-Trevelyan had remained largely silent (the acquisition of specialist expertise and managerial skills); but this, in turn, was made increasingly diffi cult by rapid political and social change – particularly the decline in deference, the transformation by affl uence of citizens into more demanding ‘consumers’ of state services and the ultimate resurgence in market values. Three belated attempts were made in the 1960s to ‘modernise’. Of these, the Fulton Report was the most famous and the least effective. Designed to remedy a perceived ‘skills
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gap’ at the top of an expanding Service, its actual legacy was to popularise the need for better management within a contracting one. Fulton had been preceded in 1961 by the Plowden Report which more effectively, if covertly, had confronted all three challenges and prompted an internal reform programme which addressed each (largely through greater planning and a reorganisation of the ‘centre’). Fulton also coincided with a bout of prescient rethinking by the Conservatives in opposition, which anticipated the national and international decline of faith in ‘big’ government and a corresponding rise in the conviction that ‘business is best’ (especially when supported by private sector, and preferably North American, management techniques). Once the Conservatives were in power, however, its impact was limited. Modernisation’s moment, therefore, failed; and the Service was thereafter subjected to a decade of vilifi cation. Perceived as a principal cause of Britain’s relative ‘decline’ and ‘ungovernability’, both major political Parties (albeit for contradictory reasons) made its reform a priority; and in this, they were abetted – as a dividend of decreased deference – by an ‘investigative’ press reluctant to pursue any further its search for scapegoats. This vilifi cation, in turn, heavily infl uenced (or at least reinforced the convictions of) Mrs Thatcher – the one Prime Minister in the twentieth century with the drive and determination to stamp, like Gladstone in the nineteenth, her personality on administrative reform. Urged by her political advisers to treat it (in comparison to economic recovery or trade union reform) as a second-level issue to be tackled later, she nevertheless immediately appointed the managing director of Marks and Spencer as a personal adviser on ‘the promotion of effi ciency and the elimination of waste’. This testifi ed to her determination to modernise the Service’s management; but the other two challenges (the acquisition of expertise and enhanced administration) were left unanswered. Two seminal events in 1981, however, cleared the way for them to be addressed in Mrs Thatcher’s second term. First, the Civil Service strike and then the abolition of the CSD removed two impediments to reform, commonly associated with national decline: the power of the unions to resist, and an unwillingness (or inability) of management to seek anything but consensus.
