ABSTRACT
Public agencies often tend to be viewed as rule-bound and inflexible bureaucratic machines which grind on regardless of changing problems and circumstances, . concerned more with their own procedures than with the public they are intended to serve. It is easy to find anecdotal horror stories: examples of 'buck-passing' between welfare agencies, exasperating delay in obtaining planning permission, or housing allocation rules applied to the level of absurdity. Public agencies cannot expect to be immune from public scrutiny and criticism, and failure or crisis is inevitably more newsworthy than adequacy, efficiency or success. However, it is not easy to find ways of measuring the relative incidence of 'failure' among the whole range of activities and services performed satisfactorily by public agencies. As far as the more routine services are concerned, these may only be noticed when something goes wrong - or they fail to be provided. At the same time, the image is perhaps symptomatic of a more fundamental anxiety about the effectiveness of public policy and government in general. Government, whether national, regional or local, appears to be adept at making statements of intention, but what happens on the ground often . falls a long way short of the original aspirations. Government either seems unable to put its policy into effect as intended, or finds that its interventions and actions have unexpected or counter-productive outcomes which create new problems. Blame for the ineffectiveness of government intervention tends to be directed either at those responsible for policy-making, for constantly producing the 'wrong' policy, or at the implementing agencies for being, apparently, unable or unwilling to act .
