ABSTRACT

The report of the Fulton Committee on the Civil Service is doubtless one of the major public documents of our time. There is a somewhat opposite criticism that the Report of the Fulton Committee on the Civil Service endeavoured to start with the enunciation of a singularly clear. The discussion which the Report has received has already made at least three points quite familiar: the first is that the emphasis the Report gave to the ‘philosophy of the amateur’ or ‘cult of the generalist’ was something more than tactless or inopportune. Secondly, the criticism of the ‘amateur’ administrator and of the combination of establishments and financial control and budgetary functions in a single department is certainly not something which comes at one with a sense of newness or revelation. The third point is that implementation is going to make a great deal of difference.