BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 16
change of operation and of culture that goes to the core of the Civil
Service.33
30 Office of Public Services Reform, Putting People at the Heart of Public Services.
31 Public Administration Select Committee, Governing the Future, Q444.
32 ‘Education Reform Lessons from England’. An interview with Michael Barber at:
www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_idϭ344385. See also Michael
Barber, Instruction to Deliver. Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of Targets
(London: Politico’s, 2007).
33 Speech by Tony Blair to the ‘Civil Service Reform, Delivery and Values’ event, 24 February
2004, at: www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page5399.asp.
. . .
Blair also emphasised the principle of earned autonomy, which involved
‘giving greater freedoms to high performing providers and focusing regulation, inspection and associated interventions on poor performers’.34
Similar principles have informed Blair’s third term of public sector
reform. The closure of the OPSR in January 2006 led to its functions
being transferred to the PMSU. While the PMSU no longer described the
government’s overall approach to public sector reform as the ‘delivery
agenda’, its ‘self-improving’ model of reform clearly encompassed many
of the same principles.35 The model sought to develop a more coherent
narrative of public sector reform. It brought together several reform initiatives already being implemented and it returned to old favourites like
joined-up government.
The PMSU model identified four components of public sector
reform: top-down performance management pressure from government; greater competition and contestability in providing public services; greater pressure from citizens through choice and voice; measures
to strengthen the capability and capacity of civil and public servants and
of central and local government to deliver improved public services.
However, there was also a new emphasis on choice and voice or ‘bottomup pressures of choice, personalisation, voice and user engagement’ to
ensure that ‘public service users’ needs, preferences and aspirations are
transmitted directly to and acted upon’.36 These principles were
reaffirmed in the Prime Minister’s policy review of public services. It
restated the ‘governing idea of the next phase of reform’ that ‘services
need to be personalized according to the needs and preferences of users’.
It also had a renewed emphasis on the role of the state as a commissioner
of services. The aim was to create:
self-improving institutions of public service, independent of centralised
state control, drawing on the best of public, private and third sector provision. These institutions must be free to develop in the way they need to,
responsive to the needs and preferences of citizens, and with a flexible
workforce that is able to innovate and change. Out of this vision will come
a new concept of modern public services: one built around the user of the
service.37
34 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, The UK Government’s Approach to Public Service Reform –
A Discussion Paper (London: Cabinet Office, 2006), p. 41.
35 Ibid., p. 23.
36 See ibid., chs. 4 and 7; and Public Administration Select Committee, Choice, Voice and
Public Services, 2004–05, HC 49-I (London: TSO, 2005).
37 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Building on Progress: Public Services (London: Cabinet
Office, 2007), pp. 30 and 7.
It is too early to comment on the significance of these ideas. Because so
much changes, so often, with no evaluation, it is impossible to say
whether any changes will, or could be, effective.38 Much will now depend
on Gordon Brown. It is clear the frenetic activity originating in No. 10 has
not stopped him from advancing his own agenda for public sector
reform, masquerading as spending reviews, the efficiency agenda and
strategic reviews (see below).
The delivery agenda not only developed policy principles but also
targets. For service deliverers and middle-level managers, the focus was on
delivering against performance targets. As the Prime Minister’s policy
review stated: ‘to drive up standards, and to tackle inequalities, the immediate focus was on stronger top-down performance management’.39 The
Prime Minister’s primary institutional mechanism for doing this was the
PMDU. It began life tracking how well departments were performing
against their Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets in ‘key delivery areas’.
These included health (waiting times for in-patient treatment and accident
and emergency), education (levels of secondary school performance,
including GCSE results), transport (cutting train delays) and criminal
justice (including street crime and the inflow of illegal asylum-seekers). It
provided progress reports to the Prime Minister on each of these areas and
intervened if it was felt that departments might fail to deliver.40 Over time,
the Unit’s remit extended to cover all PSAs, although it continued to focus
on the Prime Minister’s top priorities. The Cabinet Secretary also gave it
oversight of the Capability Review Programme, which assessed the capacity of departments to deliver their objectives (see below). The problem in
assessing the PMDU is that it was only one of several mechanisms used by
the core executive to track progress against PSAs.
Running across both the modernising and delivery agendas was an
ever-present desire to improve public sector management. All four of
Blair’s Cabinet Secretaries entered office with new ideas on the best way to
reform the civil service. The Prime Minister delivered several speeches on
the subject.41 So civil service reform has always been high on the agenda
38 For a review of the available evidence, see Lesley Hodgson, Catherine M. Farrell and
Michael Connolly, ‘Improving UK Public Services: A Review of the Evidence’, Public
Administration, 85, 2007: 355–82.
39 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Building on Progress, p. 23.
40 Michael Barber, ‘How Blair Avoided a Mugging as Street Crime Left Big Cities Unsafe’,
The Times, 15 May 2007, at: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/the_blair_years/
article1790129.ece?printϭyes.
41 See Blair, speech at ‘Civil Service Reform, Delivery and Values’ event; Gus O’Donnell, ‘Gus’
Vision’, at: www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform/index.asp; Andrew Turnbull, ‘Valedictory
. . .
and there was a general concern to improve leadership and professional
skills. For example, Gus O’Donnell talks about his: ‘vision . . . for a civil
service that exudes pride, pace, passion and professionalism – the Four Ps
as I call them – that together can keep the civil service relevant and
effective’.42
Throughout, the problem was that the Prime Minister had no clear
idea of how to bring about that improvement. He made it clear that leadership was central to public service delivery and, where successful leadership could not be foun
d in the public sector, then government would look
to the private or voluntary sectors irrespective of the policy area in question. There was also a general belief that the private sector performed
better than the public sector, but there was no clear direction that successive Cabinet Secretaries could follow. The result was a constant stream of
individual reform initiatives clustered around five themes: leadership;
skills training and employee secondments; individual performance management and reward; diversity; and better recruitment practices and
career development. Few of the initiatives stood the test of time. As the
Cabinet Office’s Capability Review concluded:
Cumulatively, these findings reflect the need for a clear operating framework running across the complex and varied business of the Department.
This has seriously weakened – particularly in the area of Civil Service
reform – its impact in delivering change through other departments, as
departments are faced with a series of unprioritised, or sometimes competing, central Civil Service initiatives.43
The last schemes were the Capability Review Programme (CRP) and
the drive to improve professional skills. The CRP was launched in
October 2005. It assessed seventeen departments against a ‘model of
capability’ which focussed on three areas – leadership, strategy and delivery. The PMDU provided oversight but the reviews were carried out by
teams of external reviewers drawn from the boards of other government
departments, the private sector and the wider public sector. The first
reviews identified key areas for improvement in departments and set out
actions to improve the department’s performance in those areas. As the
CRP website states: ‘The overarching aim is to achieve a Civil Service
Footnote 41 ( cont. )
Lecture’, 27 July 2005, at: www.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/rtf/sat_valedictory_lecture.
rtf/; and Richard Wilson, ‘Portrait of a Profession Revisited’, Public Administration, 81,
2003: 365–78.
42 O’Donnell, ‘Gus’ Vision’.
43 Cabinet Office, Capability Review of the Cabinet Office (London: Cabinet Office, 2006),
p. 22.
which is better at delivery – that can deliver its existing targets, understand its future challenges and rise to meet them efficiently and
effectively.’44
The Professional Skills for Government Programme was launched in
September 2005. This scheme aimed to give civil servants ‘the right mix
of skills and expertise to enable their Departments or agencies to deliver
effective services’.45 In place of the generalists, three new career groupings
were introduced – corporate service, operational delivery and policy
delivery. There was also a new assessment framework, which required
civil servants to demonstrate skills and experience in such areas as people
management, financial management, programme and project management, analysis and the use of evidence.
The plethora of reform initiatives was not always seen as significant in
the departments. As one official commented: ‘the relatively subtle
changes which have taken place in the reform agenda between 1999 and
now don’t seem worthy of close analysis from our end of the telescope’.46
However, the restless search for reform provided continued evidence of a
floundering and directionless political and administrative class. As
Richard Wilson, the former Head of the Home Civil Service, lamented:
I would not want to claim that the manner in which we implemented all
these reforms over the years was a model to emulate. There was not enough
overall vision or strategic planning. Too often it was uncoordinated, with
different parts of the centre of government launching similar initiatives
simultaneously or at a pace which long-suffering managers in departments
found difficult to handle.47
Blair was dissatisfied with the performance of the civil service but he
never knew what he wanted. This lack of direction was just as evident in
his constant renaming and refashioning of central departments.48 He was
a Prime Minister in search of a toolkit for steering the heart of government, but he never found one he could use effectively.
44 ‘Civil Service Capability Reviews – Background’, at: www.civilservice.gov.uk/reform/
capability_reviews/background.asp.
45 ‘Professional Skills for Government’, at: http://psg.civilservice.gov.uk/content.asp.
46 Cited in Bovaird and Russell, ‘Civil Service Reform in the UK’, p. 319.
47 Richard Wilson, ‘The Civil Service in the New Millennium’, valedictory speech, May 1999.
See also Richard Wilson, Tomorrow’s Government Lecture (London: Constitution Unit,
2006).
48 On the extent of these changes see www.civilservice.gov.uk/management/statistics/
changes/index.asp; and the individual reports at: www.civilservice.gov.uk/management/
statistics/news/index.asp.
. . .
The governance story
The governance story provides an alternative to the Westminster model.
It highlights the place of networks in British politics, the informal
authority of which supplements and supplants the formal authority of
government. It stresses the horizontal and vertical networks of interdependence in which the core executive is embedded.49 In this section, we
focus on the horizontal networks of Westminster and Whitehall and the
story of the rival courts of Brown and Blair. We argue that the core executive cannot be seen as a single decision centre focused on Blair. Rather, it
is a set of overlapping networks and central institutions that are all too
often confounded by central fragmentation. The Blair reforms of the
centre sought to impose the desired degree of coordination, but he was
just one actor among many interdependent ones in the networks that
criss-cross Whitehall, Westminster and beyond. So now we tell the governance story of the Blair government.
If the Cabinet Office is all about using soft levers, such as influence,
support and partnerships, then the Treasury is its opposite, controlling as
it does the hard levers, most notably the power of the purse. It was, and
will remain, a prominent actor in the core executive. While the court politics, personality clashes and rivalry between Blair and Brown have been
the subject of relentless commentary, important institutional changes,
which did not provoke the same media interest, also took place. The
intertwining of court politics and institutional change meant there was
not only a second centre of coordination but also a second wellspring of
civil service reform.
As soon as he took up office, the Chancellor made it clear that he
wanted the Treasury to extend its reach far beyond its traditional
Ministry of Finance role. He outlined what he expected his department to
do in a speech to the Institute of Fiscal Studies: ‘A Labour Treasury would
need to be not just a Ministry of Finance, but also a Ministry working
with other departments to deliver long-term economic and social
renewal.’50 The Department fleshed out these comments in a memorandum that it submitted to the Treasury Select Commi
ttee:
49 See: R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham: Open University Press,
1997); and for a review of the debate see R. A. W. Rhodes, ‘ Understanding Governance
Revisited’, Organization Studies, 28, 2007: 1–22.
50 Gordon Brown, ‘Modernising the British Economy: The New Mission for the Treasury’,
speech, Institute of Fiscal Studies, London, 27 May 1999, at: www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/
newsroom_and_speeches/speeches/chancellorexchequer/speech_chex_270599.cfm.
With the macroeconomic framework now firmly established, more
resources can be directed towards examining microeconomic issues.
Evidence-based microeconomic and distributional analysis is essential to
underpin the Treasury’s output – from Budget tax measures through developments in competition policy and analysis of poverty issues to work on
reform of the legal aid system and deciding transport priorities.51
This theme became constant. The Treasury was: ‘not simply concerned
with controlling spending, but also with achieving value for money
and with using spending programmes to make the economy work better’.52
More colloquially, the former Treasury Permanent Secretary, Terry Burns,
explained the change of emphasis by saying that: ‘macro-economic policy
is very boring . . . so . . . we are getting very interested in social policy’.53
This change of direction was given institutional expression.54
Macroeconomic policy, which used to be important enough to have its
own directorate, was moved to the International and Finance Directorate
where it sits with several other sections. The role of the Public Services
and Growth (PSG) Directorate grew. It still comprised the spending
teams shadowing departments, but it now combined that role with tracking performance against PSAs and efficiency targets. It also housed the
Enterprise and Growth Unit, which worked on competition and economic regulation, corporate and private finance, enterprise and science
and industry. At various times, other teams worked on microeconomic
policy, including productivity; competition, regulation and the energy
market; regulatory reform; financial services reform; and public sector
pay and efficiency. Special-purpose teams were also created to support