ABSTRACT
By 1979 the time was ripe for radical administrative reform. Political and popular expectations were high. Initially, Fulton had popularised elite concerns about the effi cacy of postwar Government; and the fl ood of memoirs from participants in the Wilson Governments, culminating in the publication of the Crossman Diaries, had deepened doubts. With the Heath Government, the focus of attack had then changed. Under the infl uence of ‘public choice’ theorists and monetarists in the USA, ‘big government’ had come to be seen as the cause of – not the potential solution for – Britain’s relative decline. Criticism focused instead on the selfaggrandising nature of the public sector and its tendency to crowd out private investment. As the economy declined, so public anger simultaneously concentrated on the ‘privileges’ of offi cials, such as guaranteed employment and infl ationproof pensions. Further evidence of incompetence (as dramatised in 1978 by Leslie Chapman’s Your Disobedient Servant) merely rubbed salt into the wound. Such a political and popular frenzy demanded – and secured – reform. During the period of ‘big government’, for example, an attempt had been made to enhance professionalism through structural change (such as the nominal abolition of the Administrative Class) and a greater emphasis on management and training. Senior Ministers had also been permitted to appoint special advisers to prevent their political instincts being dulled by bureaucrats. Then to reduce ‘big government’, cash limits had been introduced to reinforce the cap on numbers; and they, in turn, had challenged the principle (pay comparability) on which industrial relations within the Service, and thus the power of staff associations, were based. This change in emphasis from expanding to contracting government had caused some embarrassment. The recently signed national pay deal, for example, had to be abruptly abrogated in 1975. On the other hand, some reforms satisfi ed both camps. ‘Accountable management’, for instance, had initially been promoted by Fulton to encourage greater professionalism but was eventually introduced, in the form of departmental agencies, by the Conservatives to increase effi ciency and contract government. Similarly, opposing factions on the English Committee in 1977 could view with equanimity the possible replacement of the Civil Service Department (intended by
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Fulton to enhance professionalism) by a Bureau of the Budget (designed to impose more rigorous control on public expenditure and administration). The prospect was even more widely welcomed because of the potential for the new Bureau to work in tandem with a strengthened Cabinet Offi ce and thereby form an embryo Prime Minister’s Offi ce, which would strengthen ‘top down’ control. How well prepared was the incoming Government under Mrs Thatcher to capitalise on such propitious circumstances? Its manifesto, it is true, promised major savings from ‘the reduction of waste, bureaucracy and over-government’ and the restoration of ‘responsible pay bargaining’.1 Such platitudes, however, were commonplace and had been uttered frequently in the past. Consequently they aroused little interest, and few expectations, amongst offi cials at the centre. Rather, as with the Heath Government, Ministers were known to disagree diametrically about the ‘proper’ role of government and were confi dently expected to be distracted by other priorities, notably industrial relations and the economy. These were the issues which had monopolised pre-election planning whereas, in sharp contrast to the 1960s and despite its relevance to the desired ‘cultural’ change, administrative reform had been relatively neglected.2 Thus Geoffrey Howe’s musing on the eve of the election about the creation of a Bureau of the Budget (which caused a certain panic within the CSD) was essentially extemporised. Whitehall could also rest assured that Mrs Thatcher herself had little personal experience of, or interest in, management.3
