Accountability of Quangos and Public Bodies: Evidence Submitted to the Public Administration Select Committee (original) (raw)

Developments in UK executive agencies: Re-examining the ‘disaggregation–reaggregation’ thesis

Public Policy and Administration, 2012

Executive agencies remain key players in UK government. However, reflecting their declining political profile, little research has emerged on the longer term evolution of this key new public management (NPM) infrastructure. Although widely cited, the ‘disaggregation–reaggregation’ thesis – which posits that a significant reversal has taken place, following the extensive agencification of the 1990s – has received little systematic evaluation. As political interest in the agency model reawakens under the Coalition Government, it is necessary to understand how the agency landscape has evolved while outside of the limelight. Accordingly, this article examines developments across 1988–2010 along two dimensions: ‘structural’, relating to organisational boundaries; and ‘functional’, relating to the department–agency task division. Viewed within this structural–functional framework, considerable merit is found in the disaggregation–reaggregation thesis, although not entirely in the terms in...

Political Studies Association Conference 2013 Panel - Arm's-Length Governance: Accountability, Performance and Change ORGANIZATIONS, FUNCTIONS AND SPACES: INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS AND THE CHANGING SHAPE OF ENGLISH GOVERNANCE

2013

This paper draws on the institutional logics approach to analyse the reform of arm's length public bodies ('quangos') by the UK's Coalition government. This perspective provides a valuable way of analysing government reform because it recognises that logics are plural. Thus, reform can be conceptualised as a process of contestation resulting from the agency of strategic actors. Our central argument has two elements. First, that public bodies' reform exposes a clash between the centrifugal 'logic of discipline' that rationalises the delegation of governmental roles and the centripetal 'logic of democracy' that requires politicians to exercise due authority. Secondly, it stimulates contestation between deeper logics within the machinery of the statebetween legislature and executive, and government's corporate centre and its departments. These zones of contestation are analysed drawing on a rich qualitative data set. We conclude that institutional logics offer new insights into the wider politics of governmental reform.

Principles meet Practicalities: Challenges of Accountability Reform in the British Civil Service

The Routledge Handbook to Accountability and Welfare State Reforms in Europe, 2016

This chapter analyses the growth and decline of the arm's-length agency model as a means of enhancing civil service accountability for the delivery of public services in the UK. In particular, it examines the political and organisational factors that made it difficult to sustain the "accountable management" logic in the long term. The chapter uses new data on the evolution of the "Next Steps" agencification programme within the justice (prisons, courts, public guardianship) policy sector.

Reforming the Westminster Model of Agency Governance: Britain and Ireland After the Crisis

Governance, 2016

Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top-down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post-New Public Management emphasis on re-centralizing administrative capacity. This paper, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in large part due to the global financial crisis. Governments have gained stronger controls over the structures and practices of agencies, but agencies are also key players in securing better governance outcomes. The implication is that the crisis has not seen a return to the archetypal command-and-control model, nor a wholly new implementation of negotiated European-type practices, but rather a new accountability balance between elements of the Westminster system itself that have not previously been well understood.

FROM AUTONOMY TO RELEVANCE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE

The Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) play an important role through enforcing accountability, reducing fiduciary risk and measuring the outcome of different programs. The credibility and impact of these institutions rests in no small part on their independence from political actors in executive and legislative branches of the government. The shift in the agenda of these institutions from financial/compliance to performance auditing and evaluation has made them more important and relevant actors in political and policy debates. Consequently, these institutions are now facing a unique "autonomy-relevance" dilemma, i.e. whereas autonomy requires that the SAIs be independent from the political actors, relevance has prompted these agencies to become more closely connected with the policy agendas of political actors. This dissertation makes an effort to capture the dynamics of this dilemma and through analyzing the experiences of the Government Accountability Office, explores the strategies that have been adopted by adopted by the institution to deal with this. Given that the GAO has gone through the entire spectrum of autonomy-relevance dilemma, an analysis of its strategies will be helpful for the international SAI community.

Reinterpreting Agencies in UK Central Government: On Meaning, Motive and Policymaking

This thesis is a qualitative and interpretive exploration of continuity and change in the role of executive agencies in UK central government. Its three objectives are: (i) to test the longevity of the semi-autonomous agency model first introduced by Conservative governments after 1988; (ii) to explore the department-agency task division in the policymaking processes supposedly fragmented by this ‘agencification’; and (iii) to evaluate the paradigmatic testament of contemporary agency policy and practice in Whitehall. The thesis builds from an extended case study conducted during the 2010 Coalition Government in the Ministry of Justice and three of its agencies – the National Offender Management Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and the Office of the Public Guardian. Social constructivist meta-theory and the application of narrative and discourse analysis together make for an account of interpretive transformation that is theorised by discursive institutionalism. Substantively, the thesis first describes an asymmetric departure from the ‘accountable management’ philosophy which the 1988 Next Steps agency programme originally epitomised. Agency meaning is multivocal, but contemporarily converges towards accountability and transparent corporate governance, rather than managerial empowerment, de-politicisation and decentralisation. Secondly, institutional preservation of the policy-delivery work dichotomy is registered, yet found to be a poor descriptor of both historic and contemporary policy processes. Agency staff act as policy initiators and collaborators, contrary to Next Steps’ quasi- contractual, principal-agent logic, and further evidencing the departmentalisation of the once arm’s-length agency model. Thirdly, and paradigmatically, while no unidirectional trend is found, the thesis adds to the growing literature positing some departure from the former ideological and practical predominance of ‘new public management’. In so doing, it also demonstrates the challenges faced by large-N population ecology and administrative systems analysis – the favoured methodology in much international agencification scholarship – in accounting for continuity and change in policy, practice and paradigm.