ABSTRACT
The reform of the Civil Service in the last third of the twentieth century was dominated by two reports: the Report of the Fulton Committee, published in 1968, and Improving Management in Government: the Next Steps, published in 1988. A third report, however, casts a long shadow over this period: the Northcote-Trevelyan Report (or more fully the Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service) published in 1854. The perceived administrative inadequacies of the 1960s were widely accredited to its malign infl uence. The opening paragraph of the Fulton Report, for example, notoriously asserted:
The Home Civil Service today is still fundamentally the product of the nineteenth-century philosophy of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. The tasks it faces are those of the second half of the twentieth century. This is what we have found; it is what we want to remedy.1
