The above is an extract from an interview for the Reflections radio programme presented by Peter Hennessey (historian and expert in the history of British government) with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997ā2007), who was reflecting on his time in office. Blair went on to note that he found the bureaucracy to have clear limitations when it came to implementing reform agendas for areas such as health, education, asylum and immigration policy and that the bureaucracy or civil service was āunresponsiveā. A more positive sentiment entered the interview later when Blair said that:
What I do accept, and I think we did this in my last six or seven years, is that you can get to a much more balanced perspective where you liberate those within the bureaucracy who actually do want to make change and who are enthusiastic.
Tony Blairās sentiments about changing the machinery of government warrants a renewed focus, particularly due to the twin policy challenges of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the final manuscript for this book was submitted during a period of lockdown as part of the pandemic crisis management control measures. The added value of this project will be to offer contemporary debates, reflections and perspectives which will feed into future academic research about how, and to what extent, the contours of governance reform in Britain will, or need to, change in the context of Brexit and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aims of the Book
Our primary aim is to examine governance reform in Britain, with a particular focus on the period since 2010. However, the authors of this book also discuss pre-2010 governance developments when it is relevant to their argument or thematic area. In substantive terms, we examine the extent to which the post-2010 reforms, taken forward by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government (Con-Lib, for short), and the developments since the re-election of the Conservative government in 2015 and 2017, have served to represent a departure from the governance reforms implemented by the post-1997 Labour government. Our dominant aim is to engage with debates about whether there has been a paradigm shift from an era of new public management to that which can be described as āpublic value managementā. This academic endeavour requires an interrogation of the extent to which such conceptual development is evident in the context of public sector reform in Britain and whether there is evidence of reform agendas, leadership cultures and political narratives that emphasise āpublic valueā.
British Governance: Post-New Public Management?
The public administration and management field has seen considerable conceptual development over the past thirty years. The traditional model of public administration (emphasising bureaucracy, hierarchy, lines of accountability and control) shifted as part of the new public management (NPM) agenda associated with Thatcherism post-1979 (Hood 1991). Economic policy reform towards monetarism, the rise of the New Right ideology and neo-liberalism led to a paradigm shift (Hall 1993), which meant that public administration academics became increasingly concerned with market mechanisms, efficiency, consumerism, outputs, regulation, competition, performance management and performance measurement. Although these terms still have considerable scholarly currency, NPM developments in the 1990s foregrounded the emphasis on perspectives such as āgovernanceā and āmodernisationā, which aligned with a post-1997 Blairite agenda. This agenda had its roots in Thatcherism and continued under āMajorismā post-1990 (Rhodes 1997; Cabinet Office 1999; Massey and Pyper 2005). The rise of āgovernanceā perspectives from the mid-1990s onwards reflected the triple developments of devolution in the UK (Marsh et al. 2003), increasing globalisation (Hay and Marsh 2000), and European integration (George 1998). As Judge (2014: 112) notes:
In the UK, devolution upwards to the European Union and other international organisations and devolution down to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales has transformed a unitary (or at least a union) state into a multi-level polityā¦characterised by non-standardised administrative structures, a complex institutional nexus and variegated decentralised policy processes.
One of the most enduring characterisations of the British state emerges from the view that the political system has become āhollowed-outā and that the core and wider executive (although a prevailing actor) is just but one actor amongst several which cross-cut the public, private and third sectors (Bevir and Rhodes 2003). The characterisation of the āhollowed-outā state promotes the idea of states remaining as āgatekeepersā in that they are able to steer and terminate policy at a strategic level. Current debates gravitate around whether British governance is less about the state being a facilitator (amongst many facilitators) but more about the manner and style of statecraft whereby the state remains an architect of governance (Bevir 2010). In this respect, notions of āmetagovernanceā and ārescalingā become conceptual reference points for understanding the capacities and approaches relating to state actions.
If public administration is about āhow things work, how governments make decisions, apply, or enforce these decisionsā (Massey and Pyper 2005: 4), then a focus on public value is about understanding the quality of governance reforms at multiple levels, including the extent to which these match public expectations. Nonetheless,...