ABSTRACT
Constitutional and administrative reform can appear in a number of guises. The Citizen’s Charter initiative has been one of the most recent mechanisms devised for holding government more accountable. The Charter initiative, which was launched in the UK in 19911 as a 10 year programme, aims to make public services more answerable to their users and to raise overall quality. Its programme has coincided with a time of considerable change in the way the public sector has been expected to go about its business; primarily the introduction of Next Steps agencies and the development of new public management (NPM), mentioned in the previous chapter.
