The British Administrative System

Principles Versus Practice

Grant Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415015516
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134979967
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This student text brings together and discusses different principles and ideas that are used in the description of policy making and administration in Britain. These include Collective Responsibility, Individual Ministerial Responsibility, Arms Lenght Control, Organisation by Function, Judicial Review of Administration. The problem for those advancing these concepts and those receiving them, is that there is a massive gap between theory and practice. Grant Jordan reassesses the tool kit of terms to help students achieve a more practical understanding of modern British administration.

Part I
Organising without certainty

Chapter 1
Government in the fog

ACCEPTING DISORDER

There are two broad positions to choose between in examining the organisation of Government. On the one hand it is possible to accept some ‘givens’: that we know (reasonably well) what we understand by ‘Government’ and to agonise over the concept displaces attention from problems of substance. Richard Rose (1984:13) has written in such a vein and managed to greatly illuminate the subject – though this aspect of his approach is challenged here. He defined Government organisations ‘as formal administrative structures established by the constitution or public laws, headed by officials elected by citizens or appointed by elected officials’. This can be labelled the two-box image. It is reasonably easy in this version to separate out into their boxes, Government (G) and non-Government (NG).

Although for some purposes such a sweeping clarification is useful and necessary, the more the boundaries are examined the less clear they become: certainty dissolves. An alternative view sees Government organisation as messy in design, overlapping in responsibilities. As Rhodes says of sub-central government the metaphor of the ‘machine’ is inappropriate, ‘A maze or labyrinth is a far more apposite image’ (1988:4). If anything that image is still too user-friendly: better perhaps a maze in the fog. As Birkenshaw, Harden and Lewis argue from a different perspective and with a different image (to the same end) in Government by Moonlight:

As to the public/private divide, the British practice has been to preach the distinctiveness of the public and private realms, and perhaps in consequence, has done all it can to obfuscate the reality of the interlocking, the comingling, of those realms.

(Birkenshaw et al. 1990:11)

This alternative disorderly view also underpins an article by Hood, Dunsire and Thompson (1978) in which they asked, ‘So you think you know what Government departments are. . . ? They argued that every student (and teacher) should be able to define ‘Government Departments’, but the task only becomes more and more complex as investigation progresses. The thrust of the Hood et al. article was that when one examines the governmental bureaucracy one finds a surprising lack of codification, definition and order. In this chapter the message is extended. Just as there is a problem with the concept of a ‘department’, there is doubt too about the wider organisational limits of Government.

This second, uncertain perspective was captured in a comment by Brian Chapman (1963:18). British Government, he said, is a rich Byzantine structure through which few can pick their way with any certainty. In two important senses this interpretation of disorder has become more rather than less powerful and influential. Christopher Pollitt reviewed a major work from the Bielefeld Interdisciplinary Project, Guidance, Control and Evaluation in the Public Sector (1985). This, he shows, reflected the views of a large number of leading academics of public administration in the early 1980s. Pollitt summarised their position thus:

the Bielefeld corpus displays a considerable measure of agreement as to the nature of ‘the problem’ [of providing a conception of public and private sectors]. From many of these chapters comes a vision of the ‘public sector’ – in all major Western countries – as multi-centred, only loosely co-ordinated yet increasingly interdependent, fuzzy at the boundaries and exhibiting ‘growing entropy’ – that is the ‘amount of energy that is needed for co-ordination within and between public sector organisations is growing faster than their output in services and society’. Gone are Weberian models of neat, monolithic hierarchies, gone is any clear legal and political separation between public and private sector organisations (PGOs abound), past is the notion that policy formulation is the crucial problem, and implementation is a lesser task, safely delegated to ruggedly practical middle-level officials.

(Pollitt 1987:106)

In brief this perspective is far less confident about finding underlying order in the design of Government. Even the boundary between Government (G) and non-Government (NG) is in doubt.

A second factor leading to the reinforcing of Chapman’s message is the ‘Next Steps’ development of Government executive agencies and other innovations in the late 1980s in Britain. This implied further movement away from any simple pattern of Central Government departments that were easy to delineate and whose status was clear. Instead there was a proliferation of organisational forms that attempted to have some of the qualities of private sector organisations.

Correspondence with the Cabinet Office in 1993 confirmed we have pragmatic arrangements largely uninfluenced by consistent principle:

You will be aware that government and offices and departments owe their establishment and organisation, together with any powers they possess and duties they perform, partly to the Royal Prerogative and partly to Parliament. Sir Ivor Jennings once wrote that, in the absence of general provisions regulating administration, ‘there is, in law, only a heterogeneous collection of ministers, officers, and authorities, exercising a mass of apparently unrelated functions’. Confronted by this situation Jennings concluded that it would be wrong to assume that there is a specific number of homogeneous entities called Departments of State. In each there is a central nucleus where decisions are taken by or on behalf of the Minister. But in many cases there are subordinate departments exercising functions prescribed by law in the name of the subordinate department. . . for example, the Commissioners of the Inland Revenue are subject to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury; but on many matters they take their own decisions in their own name. Also, there are connected with many of the Departments of State semi-autonomous authorities who consult the Minister and his advisers only in respect of those matters where it is so provided by law.

I do not know when Jennings wrote that but the situation is not so very different today. It is a complex area where there is, in law, no generally applicable definition of the term ‘government department’, nor is its use standardised for everyday purposes. Having said that, no difficulties appear to have arisen when the expression ‘a government department’ has been used in legislation. We conclude, therefore, that the meaning of the term ‘department’ depends on the particular statutory context in which it is used.

This non-definition of the nature of a department is an indication of the struggle in the centre of government to find a form of words that deals with the fragmented practice. It confirms that there is no regular pattern which might be uncovered by more thorough investigation.

One is reassured when others too are puzzled. Drewry and Butcher (1988:55) give some figures about the changing size and shape of the civil service but warn,

We must not forget . . . even the definitional boundaries of our subject are indistinct. It is hazardous to try to quantify something when a penumbra of uncertainty surrounds the definition of what that something is.

(Drewry and Butcher 1988:55)

The problem of understanding the boundaries between Central Government and these loosely attached units or agencies (equally a puzzle in the United States) is considered below (see pp. 32–44), but first we need to note that Central Government is itself uncomfortably unclear about self-identity. Basic questions such as ‘What is a civil servant?’, What is a department?’, What is a Secretary of State?’, cannot be answered without a subtext of reservations. Wettenhall (1986) looks at Government organisation in several countries, though mainly Australia. He shows that definitions of ‘ministry’ and ‘department’ are consistently inconsistent.

Hood and Dunsire (1981:37) attempted to record the main features of British Central Government by relying as much as possible on published material. The intention was not to uncover any policy secrets, but to map the organisational structure of the system. However, they soon discovered that different published lists – all with more or less similar claim to be considered ‘official’ or authoritative – existed. There were thus different possible interpretations of what constituted departments and sub-departments. In The Civil Service Yearbook (1975) they found 787 bodies listed. These were not the same departments as understood in other governmental publications. Even the main headings (227) included organisations such as the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service which were not included in other listings. The Treasury Memorandum on the Supply Estimates for 1976–7 (Cmnd 6452) picked out 67 ‘departments’. These were apparently close to, but not identical to, the 64 units which were counted as departments in the May 1976 version of HM Ministers and Senior Staff in Public Departments, or the 61 units which they found in civil service staff number returns.

Moreover Hood et al. (1978:23) note that 26 bodies were listed as departments for purposes of the index of Hansard whereas only 24 bodies were considered to be departments for the purpose of answering Parliamentary Questions. They point out that the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (‘the Ombudsman’) listed 38 in his Annual Report. Other sources – e.g. the annual list produced in connection with the 1947 Crown Proceedings Act or the list produced by the Property Services Agency of departments which could receive free PSA services – produce yet other numbers.

Hood and Dunsire (1981:40) concluded that the definition of a department was as a deep legal (indeed philosophical) question – ‘and there is certainly no single and all-encompassing definition of such a thing – only a variety of lists of agencies called “departments”, compiled for a number of different purposes, with a considerable degree of difference between them’.

The ‘five-star’ departments

Though these issues pose surprising difficulty, none the less all is not completely jumbled; there is a ‘core’ to Government that would appear on everyone’s list. If we look at the departments headed by a Secretary of State then we cover most of that core. We can term these major bodies as ‘five-star’ departments (based on their importance) or, perhaps, by referring to their outstanding characteristic, we can more clumsily call them Cabinet-Minister-led departments. These are essentially the mainstream departments headed by a Cabinet Minister (see Table 1.1).

While the normal arrangement is one Cabinet Minister (even more precisely one Secretary of State) to each major department – there are (inevitably) deviations from this norm. There is not a tidy and orderly pattern that can be easily grasped: there is an aggregation of exceptions.

The Treasury of the early 1990s has three Ministers in the Cabinet – if the Prime Minister’s archaic status as First Lord of the Treasury is included. Realistically however the figure is two: while PMs do have a dominating input into Treasury deliberations this is as Prime Minister and not through their notional place within the Treasury. But even discounting the PM, the Treasury is now ‘double banked’ in the Cabinet. The Chancellor’s position is reinforced by the presence of the Chief Secretary (his Treasury No. 2) who carries the main burden of the public expenditure side of the department. In 1994 Michael Portillo was Chief Secretary, with Kenneth Clarke as Chancellor. The Treasury position is an unusual case in Whitehall where the second in command in the department is accepted as the main authority in an area of business (domestic public expenditure). The participation of the Chief Secretary in the Cabinet is a comparatively new ‘norm’. (The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury is also sometimes in the Cabinet, but of course – despite the label – the holder of that post is in reality Chief Whip and not a part of the working Treasury.)

In recent years the Department of Employment has also on occasionbeen ‘double banked’ in the Cabinet. This was less due to the importance of the topic than to the fact that the then (1986) Secretary of State, Lord Young, was not an MP – and hence not available to be answerable to the Commons. Current convention demands that under these circumstances there should also be a Cabinet-rank Minister to answer for the department in the House of Commons. Thus, analogously, in 1982 when the Foreign Secretary was from the House of Lords – i.e. Lord Carrington – there was a supporting Minister in the Cabinet who could deal with the Commons – i.e. Humphrey Atkins.

Table 1.1 ‘Five-star’ departments*

The list of ‘five-star’ departments shows that not all Cabinet members are styled Secretaries of State. Some Secretaries of State enjoy, by tradition, alternative titles for their posts – for example, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Agriculture. (In 1992 Michael Heseltine resurrected the title President of the Board of Trade.) These are simply historical terms.

Other exceptions to the normal Secretary of State label are extravagant Gilbert and Sullivan sounding designations such as Lord Privy Seal. The inclusion of such Ministers in the Cabinet gives the Prime Minister some flexibility in the composition of Cabinet. Not all the Cabinet members head up five-star departments. Some head up none and some of the departments that are headed by Ministers of Cabinet rank are very minor. These departments have Cabinet-level heads as the by-product of the PM wanting the Minister in the Cabinet for political reasons rather than because there is any administrative rationale.

In the 1986 Civil Service Yearbook no Minister was connected with the Paymaster General’s Office (with over 800 staff). Kenneth Clarke’s two immediate predecessors in the Cabinet ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I ORGANISING WITHOUT CERTAINTY
• PART II ACCOUNTABILITY WITHOUT CERTAINTY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY