Changing Patterns of Governance in the United Kingdom: Reinventing Whitehall? (Transforming...

David Marsh, David Richards and Martin J. Smith

Changing Patterns ofGovernance in theUnited Kingdom

Reinventing Whitehall?

Transforming Government

General Editor: R. A. W. Rhodes, Professor of Politics, University of Newcastle

This important and authoritative new series arises out of the seminal ESRCWhitehall Programme and seeks to fill the enormous gaps in our knowledge of thekey actors and institutions of British government. It examines the many largechanges during the postwar period and puts these into comparative context byanalysing the experience of the advanced industrial democracies of Europe andthe nations of the Commonwealth. The series reports the results of the WhitehallProgramme, a four-year project into change in British government in the postwarperiod, mounted by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Titles include:

Nicholas Deakin and Richard ParryTHE TREASURY AND SOCIAL POLICYThe Contest for Control of Welfare Strategy

David Marsh, David Richards and Martin J. SmithCHANGING PATTERNS OF GOVERNANCE IN THE UNITED KINGDOMReinventing Whitehall?

B. Guy Peters, R. A. W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (editors)ADMINISTERING THE SUMMITAdministration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries

R. A. W. Rhodes (editor)TRANSFORMING BRITISH GOVERNMENTVolume One: Changing InstitutionsVolume Two: Changing Roles and Relationships

Martin J. SmithTHE CORE EXECUTIVE IN BRITAIN

Kevin TheakstonLEADERSHIP IN WHITEHALL

Kevin Theakston (editor)BUREAUCRATS AND LEADERSHIP

Patrick Weller, Herman Bakvis and R. A. W. Rhodes (editors)THE HOLLOW CROWNCountervailing Trends in Core Executives

marsh et al/96589/crc 25/9/01 3:27 pm Page 1

Transforming GovernmentSeries Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71580–2(outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below withyour name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS, England


Changing Patterns of Governance in the United KingdomReinventing Whitehall?

David MarshProfessor of PoliticsUniversity of Birmingham

David RichardsLecturer in PoliticsUniversity of Liverpool

and

Martin J. SmithProfessor of PoliticsUniversity of Sheffield

Foreword by

R. A. W. RhodesDirector, ESRC Whitehall Programme, andProfessor of PoliticsUniversity of Newcastle


© David Marsh, David Richards and Martin J. Smith 2001

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission ofthis publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied ortransmitted save with written permission or in accordance withthe provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copyingissued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham CourtRoad, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to thispublication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civilclaims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identifiedas the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2001 byPALGRAVEHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division andPalgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).

ISBN 0–333–79289–0

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling andmade from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

A catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMarsh, David, 1946–

Changing patterns of governance in the United Kingdom :reinventing Whitehall? / David Marsh, David Richards, and Martin J. Smith.

p. cm. — (Transforming government)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–333–79289–01. Cabinet officers—Great Britain. 2. Civil service—Great

Britain. I. Richards, David, 1968– II. Smith, Martin J. (Martin John),1961– III. Title. IV. Transforming government (Palgrave (Firm))

JN405 .M37 2001320.941—dc21

2001032123

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 110 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

Printed and bound in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire


To Emma, Jean and Suzy

Contents

Foreword by R. A. W. Rhodes ix

Acknowledgements xii

1 Introduction 1

2 Culture and Power in Whitehall 14

3 Structural Change in Central Government 43

4 Departmental Cultures 69

5 Departments and the Core Executive 101

6 Reassessing the Role of Departmental Cabinet Ministers 132

7 The Changing Relations between Ministers and Civil Servants 155

8 The Departments’ Relations Outside the Core Executive 181

9 The Role of Europe 209

10 Assessing the Differentiated Polity Model: towards an Asymmetric Power Model 232

Appendix on Methods 251

Bibliography 254

Index 268

vii

Foreword: TransformingGovernment

There are enormous gaps in our knowledge of the key actors and insti-tutions in British government. We cannot do simple things likedescribing the work of ministers of state, permanent secretaries, andtheir departments. Also, there have been large changes in British gov-ernment during the postwar period, such as: the growth of the welfarestate; the professionalisation of government; the consequences ofrecession; the effects of New Right ideology; the impact of theEuropean Union; the effects of new technology; the hollowing-out ofthe state; and the new public management with its separation of policyand administration. We do not know how these changes affectedBritish government. And we cannot understand the effects of thesechanges by focusing only on Britain. We must also analyse the experi-ence of the advanced industrial democracies of Europe and theCommonwealth.

To repair these gaps in our knowledge and to explain how and whyBritish government changed in the postwar period, the Economicand Social Research Council mounted the Whitehall Programme on‘The Changing Nature of Central Government in Britain’ between1994 and 1999. This series on ‘Transforming Government’ reportsthe results of that five-year research programme. The series has fiveobjectives:

• Develop theory – to develop new theoretical perspectives to explainwhy British government changed and why it differs from othercountries.

• Understand change – to describe and explain what has changed inBritish government since 1945.

• Compare – to compare these changes with those in other EUmember states and other states with a ‘Westminster’ system ofgovernment.

• Build bridges – to create a common understanding between acade-mics and practitioners.

• Dissemination – to make academic research accessible to a variedaudience covering sixth-formers and senior policy-makers.

ix

The book covers six broad themes:

• Developing theory about the new forms of governance.• The hollowing-out of the state in Britain, Europe and the

Commonwealth.• The fragmenting government framework.• The changing roles of ministers and the senior civil service.• Constitutional change.• New ways of delivering services.

Apart from the now badly dated series on Whitehall departmentsproduced by the Royal Institute of Public Administration, there are few studies of how central government departments work. Thereare some fine books on the Treasury, including Nicholas Deakin and Richard Parry’s study in this series, but little has been publishedon other departments. David Marsh, David Richards and MartinSmith admirably repair the gap with their study of the Home Office,the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department of Social Security and the dear departed Department of Energy between1974 and 1997. Based on interviews with 183 civil servants, ministersand interest group spokespeople, they provide an authoritative com-parative analysis of how and why departments differ from oneanother.

The authors focus on such questions as the importance of policy net-works, the relationship between the prime minister and departments,fragmentation of the executive, and the extent to which the Britishstate has been hollowed out. The first three chapters reporting theirfieldwork deal with structural and cultural change in the four depart-ments. Changes in policy are saved for a later volume. They then con-sider the role of departments in the core executive. Finally, theyexamine the role of such key actors as ministers and top civil servantsbefore looking outwards at the effect of interest groups and theEuropean Union.

Among their many conclusions, three stand out. First, muchremains the same. The extent of structural and cultural change variesbetween departments, with the Home Office lagging behind.Ministers and civil servants alike continue to speak the language ofthe Westminster model. Second, Whitehall remains federal, withmost officials and ministers working inside their department. Finally,policy advice is no longer the exclusive privilege of top civil servants.This task has drifted outwards (to advisers) and downwards (to lower

x Foreword: Transforming Government

grades of civil servants). Their overall conclusion is that British gov-ernment remains marked by structured inequality in which a govern-ment subject to limited external constraints ‘knows best’.

R. A. W. RHODES

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Foreword: Transforming Government xi

Acknowledgements

This book owes its existence to the ESRC Whitehall programme. Theprogramme, and a subsequent grant, not only funded (award numbersL124251023 and R00022657) the time to conduct the research butensured that we had access to Whitehall. The success of the researchowes much to the enthusiasm and hard work of Rod Rhodes. He pro-vided support throughout the project, eased some sticky moments interms of interviews and provided comments on the final draft. Wewould also like to thank the many officials and politicians who gave ustheir time. David Richards and Martin Smith, in particular, spent manymonths travelling the corridors of Whitehall and the leafy environs ofsouth-east England speaking to retired and contemporary officials.They were invariably hospitable and, as readers will see, open abouttheir views on the changing roles of officials and departments.Without their time and frankness there would have been no book. It isa credit to our ruling elite that we had very few refusals for interviewsdespite the many pressures on their time. We would also like to thankJim Buller, John Chapman, Francesca Gains, Matthew Flinders and BobWatt, for various forms of help in terms of conducting interviews, tran-scribing tapes and providing research assistance. Each was working onPhDs that had some relationship with our research and provided afurther source of critical input for our work. Matthew Flinders and BobWatt both worked as research officers on the project and gave much tothe final product. Finally, this is a truly collaborative exercise. All threeauthors have been involved closely throughout the project and allchapters bear the imprint of the team. The opportunity for often frankbut always friendly exchanges of view has, we hope, produced a betterbook.

xii

1Introduction

The importance of British government departments both constitution-ally and politically is unquestionable. Daintith and Page emphasise theconstitutional centrality of departments (1999: 6):

Our executive (while still conceived of as a unitary crown) is madeup of departments, and it is normally to the heads of these depart-ments (who are usually but not invariably ministers) not the gov-ernment as a whole, that powers, and resources, are allocated bylaw.

Departments are a concentration of political and bureaucraticresources. They are the source of most policy and they hold overallresponsibility for delivering policies. As such, the activities of the coreexecutive occur within the departmental framework. The majority ofministers operate within, and draw most of their resources from,departments. Officials are based in, and loyal to, departments. In fact,most of the key concerns of those analysing British government – forexample the relationship between ministers and civil servants orbetween civil servants and interest groups and the power of the primeminister – are only meaningful in the context of departments.

Despite their importance, there is an absence of research into gov-ernment departments. Only the Treasury has received much attention(Heclo and Wildavsky 1981; Thain and Wright 1996; Chapman 1988;Deakin and Parry 2000), while there have been few studies of the oper-ation of other departments. In addition, the studies undertaken havebeen largely descriptive and atheoretical (for a review of the existingliterature see Smith, Marsh and Richards 1995). This paucity of workresults, in large part, from an over-concentration on the role of the

1

prime minister (see Baker 1993; Madgwick 1991; James 1992; Kavanaghand Seldon 1999), an emphasis which was exacerbated by a fascinationwith Margaret Thatcher and her policy style (King 1985; Minogue andBiddiss, 1988).

Departments are an important and under-researched area. In addi-tion, a study of departments is long overdue given the extent ofchange in central government over the last two and a half decades.This change has been described in great detail by a number of authors(Hennessy 1989; Pollitt 1990; Fry 1995). Here, the key point is thatduring the Conservatives’ period of office from 1979 to 1997, therewere three major reports into British central government: the FinancialManagement Initiative in 1982; the Next Steps Report in 1988; and theSenior Management Review (1995), with the linked fundamentalExpenditure Review (for details see Smith 1999a; Richards 1997 andChapter 3 below). These reports aimed fundamentally to change theculture, structure and management procedures of central governmentdepartments. Of course, we shall assess the extent to which those aimswere achieved, but there is no doubt that the period upon which wefocus saw greater change than any equivalent period, certainly in thiscentury. As such, it deserves close attention.

Our aim will be to examine the operation of four departmentsbetween 1974 and 1997 in order to establish the extent of, and reasonsfor, the changes that have occurred. Three of our research decisionsneed brief justification here, although we return to the last two in amethodological appendix (see below pp. 251–5).

First, we concentrated upon the period between 1974 and 1997 fortwo reasons. As we have already emphasised, it was a period ofsignificant change in central government; and, also, we used 1974 as a starting point to give us some limited perspective on theConservative years. This last point raises another issue. It would havebeen interesting to compare the new Labour government with theConservative. However, the vast majority of our interviews dealt only with the Conservatives’ period in office, as most of them wereconducted between late 1995 and early 1998, either before Labourwere in power or before our interviewees had any perspective onLabour’s time in office. We do have some interviews with civilservants and interest group officials undertaken in 1998 and early1999 and, as such, a number of chapters include some considerationof the period since 1997. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasisethat we use this material mainly to throw more light on theConservative years.

2 Changing Patterns of Governance in the United Kingdom

Second, our study is of four departments: the Home Office; theDepartment of Trade and Industry; the Department of Social Security;and the now dismantled Department of Energy. Time and resourcesprevented a study of all departments and no set of departments wouldbe ‘representative’. However, our choice gave us a good spread ofdepartments in terms of size, resources, functions and the extent ofchange that occurred in the period. We explain our choice in moredetail in the methodological appendix.

Third, our data are drawn from 183 semi-structured interviews con-ducted with ministers, civil servants and interest group representativeswho, between 1974 and 1997, were associated with our four depart-ments. All the interviews reported were conducted by one or more ofthe authors, and, where the interviewee agreed, the interview wastaped and subsequently transcribed.

Clearly then, we have not undertaken a behavioural study. There aretwo reasons for our approach. Most prosaically, it is not possible toobserve or shadow civil servants and ministers. As such, we mustdepend on reports and interpretations of events by participants, and ofcourse, on our interpretations of what we are told. As far as possible,we tried to ask a variety of respondents, politicians, civil servants andinterest groups representatives for their ‘version’ of events and inter-pretation of motivations; this ensures a degree of triangulation so thatthe researcher can compare accounts and explanations. However, theresearcher must always be aware of the perils of this type of research(see Devine 1995; Richards 1996).

More fundamentally, we are not positivists. We do not believe thatthere is a ‘real’ world out there that we can discover merely by usingthe ‘correct’, to most positivists scientific, methods. This is not theplace for a long exposition of our epistemological position (for a briefoutline of the position we adopt see Marsh et al. 1999). Suffice it to sayhere that we are critical realists. In our view, there is a real world ‘outthere’ that is independent of our construction of it; this much we havein common with positivists and it distinguishes us from relativists (foran outline of these different positions see Furlong and Marsh 2001).However, to us, while social phenomena exist independently of ourinterpretation, or discursive construction of them, nevertheless thatdiscursive construction affects outcomes. The importance of this dis-tinction will become clearer below when we discuss thestructure/agency question.

In fact, there are two related issues here: the status of the respon-dents’ views; and the status of the researcher’s interpretations. An

Introduction 3

agent’s interpretation of the world, which itself may be structured by adominant discourse, has a crucial effect on outcomes. So, if we aretrying to explain why there have been changes in British central gov-ernment we need to know how agents, whether civil servant or minis-ters, understand their world and the projected changes to it. In effect,we present a view of the British political elite’s interpretation of theirworld and the role of departments within it and we attempt to estab-lish both how that view/interpretation is affected by structural changeand how, in turn, it changes structures. As such, interviewing thoseinvolved within, and with, departments is crucial.

Nevertheless, we have to recognise that the interviewees’ views arepartial in both senses of the word. S/he will be narrating a particularstory; probably one in which her/his role is exaggerated. One wayforward, which we adopt, is to triangulate as much as possible, gettingas many different views on, or interpretations of, an event or a rela-tionship as practical. However, there are problems and we encountereda particular one in our study. Our interview material with ministers,and particularly civil servants, indicated that both tend to have astrong view of how policy is made. In our view, civil servants and min-isters have a very agency-centred view of changes within departmentsand the policy-making process. They think of politics and policy-making in terms of the role of individuals and the interactionsbetween them. Obviously, individuals are important in structural, cul-tural and policy change, but, in our view, it is important not to neglectthe manner in which structures constrain or facilitate the actions ofagents.

A second key issue is the status of the researcher. Data is of no useuntil it has been interpreted and it is the researcher who does the inter-preting. Of course, in large part, one’s interpretation is shaped by thetheoretical framework one uses and, for this reason, we outline ourposition and concerns at some length below. However, we also quoteextensively from our interviews to allow the reader to assess our inter-pretations of what was said. We have used a fairly standard procedurein quoting from our interviews: civil servants are never named, whileministers and interest group officials are named, unless we werespecifically asked not to do so.

Developing a theoretical framework

One of the weaknesses of most existing studies of British central gov-ernment, and this reflects a weakness with the study of British politics


more generally, is that they are atheoretical. We are usually presentedwith an analysis of an institution, for example Parliament or a depart-ment, that examines how it operates, but the study is not locatedwithin the context of broader questions about the nature of gover-nance in Britain and fails to utilise meta-theoretical discussions, forexample on structure and agency or the role of institutions and ideas,to help provide a more systematic explanation of outcomes. As such,we endorse the arguments of the editors of the British Journal of Politicsand International Relations (The editors 1999: 3):

Knowledge is not theory neutral. It is the explicit, or perhaps moreusually implicit, theoretical assumptions that we make whichinfluence what we study, how we study it and how we interpret the results which are generated. In other words, theory is not an optional extra; it underpins all the empirical studies that weundertake.

Our broader view on British governance is based upon a sympatheticcritique of Rhodes’s differentiated polity model. In this section, weshall begin with an exposition of Rhodes’s position; our critique of itwill emerge throughout the book and we develop it more systemati-cally in the conclusion (for an overview of our view see Marsh,Richards and Smith, 2001). However, in the final part of this section,we also outline our position on three seminal issues given our concernsin this volume: the power structure in Britain and how it should beconceptualised; the structure/agency problem; and the relationshipbetween institutions and ideas.

Departments and governance in Britain

In recent years there has been a growing literature on changing formsor patterns of governance in Britain (see Rhodes, 1997, 2000; Bevir andRhodes 2001). This is an important development for us, given that itimplies that there have been significant changes in the operation ofthe core executive, and of course departments, which is a key focus ofthis book. Rhodes argues that the dominant view of conceptualisingBritish politics has been the Westminster model, the key characteristicsof which are:

• parliamentary sovereignty• accountability through free and fair elections

Introduction 5

• majority party control over the executive• strong cabinet government• central government dominance• doctrine of ministerial responsibility• non-political civil servants

As such, the Westminster model suggests that, while the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty underpins the institutions and processesof British politics, the way the system operates is based upon twolinked characteristics of the British political system: a first-past-the-post electoral system, which, while it holds the executiveaccountable at periodic free and fair elections, almost inevitably givesone party an overall majority; and fairly tight party discipline which,together with the electoral system, produces majority government,strong cabinet government and executive dominance of thelegislature.

Rhodes takes strong issue with the Westminster model and offers an alternative that he calls the differentiated polity model. Its mainfeatures are:

• governance • power dependence• policy networks• a segmented executive• intergovernmental relations• a hollowed-out state

The very use of the term ‘governance’, rather than government, isrevealing; governance is a broader term implying the involvement ofactors well beyond the core executive. At the same time, the view isthat the core executive itself is not a simple unified whole; there will bedivisions within Cabinet, between departments and among civilservants and ministers. More broadly, Rhodes suggests that theWestminster model is also wrong to see politics as a zero-sum gamewith the prime minister dominating ministers, ministers dominatingcivil servants or central government dominating local government.Rather, there are a series of exchange relationships; each actor pos-sesses resources that the other needs.

So, for example, the two models differ considerably in their view ofthe Civil Service. In the Westminster model, civil servants are non-political, unlike in the US or France, but they are also ‘good and


faithful servants’. In this view, civil servants give policy advice toministers and then carry out the minister’s decisions. Of course, thisis only one model of the nature of minister/civil servant relations. Inthe 1970s politicians (see Benn 1981) and academics (Kellner andCrowther Hunt 1980) increasingly argued that civil servants were thedominant partners, with ministers becoming the creatures of theirdepartment. This model became common currency, and perhaps the‘accepted wisdom’, when it was enshrined in the popular TVprogramme, Yes Minister.

In contrast, Rhodes argues that there is a problem with both theseformulations because they treat the relationship as though it were azero-sum power game. In Rhodes’s view, it is better understood as anexchange relationship. Ministers need civil servants to provide adviceand help in the implementation of policy. Civil servants need minis-ters to win resources for the department from the primeminister/Treasury/ cabinet and promote and defend the department’sinterests in Cabinet, Parliament and, increasingly, Europe. As such, onmost occasions, and in most ways, relationships are better understoodas a positive-sum game.

In focusing upon the broader context of governance, Rhodes alsopays particular attention to the role of policy networks. The Germanand Dutch literature on policy networks suggests that networks havereplaced hierarchy and markets as the central mode of governance(see Marsh: 1998, ch. 1) and, to an extent, Rhodes draws on this liter-ature. However, the British literature on networks is more circum-spect (see Marsh and Rhodes (eds) 1992a; Smith 1993; Marsh (ed.)1998; and for a critique see Dowding 1995). Actually, the chief pro-ponents of this British view do not see tight policy networks asomnipresent or omnipotent; rather they view the presence andinfluence of networks as empirical questions. Of course, to the extentthat tight policy networks do exist and are not dominated by govern-ment actors, then the role of departments as the key governmentactors in the policy-making process is more limited than theWestminster model implies.

Despite all this, perhaps the most radical aspect of the Rhodes modelis his emphasis upon the hollowing-out of the British state (see Rhodes1997; also Weller, Bakvis and Rhodes 1997). Rhodes argues that itsauthority, autonomy and power have been reduced. Authority andpower have dispersed: upwards, to Europe and other internationalpolitical and economic institutions; downwards, through agencies,quangos and, more recently, the introduction of devolution; and out-

Introduction 7

wards, through privatisation, marketisation and policy networks. Ofcourse, to the extent that there has been hollowing out, then a, if notthe, key feature of the Westminster model is undermined; the strongcentral executive.

One of our aims, then, is to assess the utility of Rhodes’s differenti-ated polity model. More specifically, we shall address the followingquestions:

• How important a role do interest groups play in the policy-makingprocess?

• Does the government dominate most policy networks?• What is the nature of relationship between the prime minister and

departments? Does the prime minister dominate departments? • How segmented is the core executive?• To what extent has the state been hollowed out?

In addition, the apparent threats to the traditional Westminster modelraise questions concerning the nature of the relationship between civilservants and ministers and, as such, we are concerned with the issue ofwhether the nature of the dependency relationships between officialsand politicians has changed to the extent that both the traditionalconstitutional rules, and the more informal ‘rules of the game’, nolonger apply.

The theoretical issues

As we argued above, in explaining the changes in the structure andculture of our departments we shall take a position on three keytheoretical issues: the question of power; the structure/agencyquestion; and the relationship between institutions and ideas. As weshall see, the three sets of issues crosscut one another.

(i) Power

Although this is the most crucial question, it needs less expositionbecause it has been well aired. However, three points are importanthere. First, the dominant perspective in studies of British politics is plu-ralism (see Marsh et al. 1999; Marsh 2001). Second, Rhodes’s differenti-ated polity model is based upon a sophisticated pluralist conception ofthe distribution of power in Britain. Third, in our view, power is muchmore concentrated than pluralism implies. Each of these pointsdeserves brief consideration.


Rhodes’s differentiated polity model is essentially a pluralist model;although it is a sophisticated elite or reformed pluralist variant (onmodern pluralism see Smith 1995; for the most sophisticated statementof modern pluralism see McFarland 1987). To Rhodes, as we saw,power is dispersed throughout the polity, at least among various elitegroups. So, power is not exercised by a strong central government,rather it is present throughout the polity and expressed in and througha complicated series of exchange relations. As such, we need to under-stand the exchanges within the segmented executive (between theprime minister and the Cabinet, the departments and the Treasury,ministers and civil servants etc.), between central and local govern-ment (both disaggregated) and between government and interestgroups (again disaggregated and occurring within policy networks).Rhodes’s analysis is an elite pluralists one because it acknowledges theexistence of competing elites and plays down the role of the electorateand Parliament. In addition, unlike many pluralists he does acknowl-edge the importance of structures as constraints on the actions ofagents. Nevertheless, Rhodes retains the key core proposition of plural-ism: that power is diffused.

To a large extent of course, the question of the utility of Rhodes’sdifferentiated polity model is an empirical one. However, noempirical investigation is theory-neutral; one’s theoretical positionaffects one’s definition, methods and empirical focus. So, it is as wellto admit at the outset that we are not pluralists. In our view, power isconcentrated. Actually, there are two aspects of this position, one ofwhich is more important here. First, in our view, we expect to findthat central government in Britain is more powerful than thedifferentiated polity suggests. Indeed, our view is that Britain, as the Westminster model suggests, retains a powerful executive. So,although Rhodes is right to emphasise that power is not a zero-sumgame and that British government is based upon a series of exchangerelationships, the balance of that exchange rests heavily in favour ofthe powerful executive. Second, although that strong executive has significant autonomy, it operates within a broader social,political and economic system that is characterised by structuredinequality. This structured inequality is reflected in the privilegedaccess which some interests have to government and, thus, it shapes, although by no means determines, political outcomes. This isnot the place to develop this argument (see Marsh 2001), but we shallreturn to this issue both in Chapter 8 and in the conclusion to thisbook.

Introduction 9

(ii) Structure and agency: a dialectical approach

The structure/agency debate is one of the most important within socialscience. However, most social science authors tend to privilege eitherstructural or intentional explanation and the position they adopt isstrongly influenced by the power theory with which they are implicitlyor explicitly working. So, for example, Dunleavy’s bureau-shapingapproach to bureaucratic change focuses upon the interests of civil ser-vants and explains the introduction of Next Steps Agencies in terms ofhis exposition of their preferences (see below pp. 156–68). In contrast,other pluralist authors have emphasised the role of Margaret Thatcherin shaping the changes in British central government in the 1980s. Forexample, some see her as politicising the Civil Service, while othersargue that the reason Civil Service reform was successful in the 1980s,in contrast to previous attempts, was because of Thatcher’s activesupport. However, all these authors use intentional explanations and,as we suggested earlier, this is a view that is shared by most politiciansand civil servants. There are fewer structural explanations of centralgovernment change, although Kingdom (1999) offers a Marxist expla-nation while some of the new institutionalist literature (for a reviewsee Peters 1999), particularly historical institutionalism, with itsemphasis upon path-dependency, has structuralist, and non-pluralist,roots.

We shall return to some of these issues in subsequent chapters.However, our key point here is that both intentional and structuralexplanations take too simplistic an approach to the relationshipbetween structure and agency (for reviews of the structure/agency liter-ature see Hay 1995 and McAnulla 2001). Our own view followsinevitably from our epistemological position. We see the relationshipbetween structure and agency as dialectical. Agents operate withinstructured contexts that constrain or facilitate their actions. As such,these structured contexts tend to make it more likely that agents willtake certain actions; in the term used by historical institutionaliststhere is ‘path dependency’. At the same time, structures are notunchanging; in fact they change in large part because of the strategicdecisions of agents co-operating within the structured contexts. Thecrucial thing is that agents do not control that structured context.However, they do interpret it and it is as mediated through that inter-pretation that the structural context affects the strategic calculations ofactors.

If this is our general position it still needs to be unpacked. In par-ticular, we need a clearer idea of the nature of the key structural and


intentional factors and in particular the role that ideas play in thisrelationship. There is little discussion in the literature on what ismeant by structure or agency. In essence, most authors appear to beconcerned with two types of structure: the particular institutionalstructures within which the relevant agent acts and the broader socialstructure within which the organisation and the agent are located.So, if we are concerned to analyse the behaviour of a minister, weneed to examine it in the context of both his/her position withingovernment – in relation to the department, the prime minister, theTreasury, the Cabinet etc. – and the broader social, economic andpolitical situation – the state of the economy, the popularity of thegovernment, the proximity of an election etc. This is importantbecause many studies of central government focus only on the con-straints within government itself, neglecting the way in which thebroader social, economic and political context constrains or enablesthe actions of the core executive. We need to recognise that there areinteractive effects between these two aspects of structure, the organ-isational and the social/economic/political, and between each ofthese and the actions of agents.

Equally, there is little discussion of what is meant by agency. Hereagain two approaches are common in the literature. Authors eitherfocus on the role of individual or group agents, for example, Thatcher’sinfluence on the Civil Service, or they are concerned with how the atti-tudes or preferences of agents shape outcomes, e.g. the Dunleavy(1991) and Dowding (1995) approach. What most, if not all, analysesfail to examine are, first, the role that ideas or culture have in relationto the structure/agency problem and, second, the way in which ideasaffect both institutions and outcomes. This brings us to our third meta-theoretical issue.

(ii) The relationship between institutions and ideas

As we have suggested, the literature on structure/agency generallyavoids the role of ideas or discourse; of the ideational realm. Yet, this ismisguided because ideas clearly affect outcomes. More importantly forthe discussion here, ideas can be important elements in either a struc-tural or an intentional explanation. So, ideas, or discourse, can clearlyconstrain or facilitate agents. In this way, as we shall see below, civilservants in departments are clearly constrained by the prevailingculture within a department; here culture, that is a set of intercon-nected ideas, roles and rules of the game, clearly acts as a structuralconstraint or enabler. In contrast, certain ideas may be a crucial part of,

Introduction 11

or may underpin, an individual agent’s interests and preferences. Here,ideas are a crucial element of an intentional explanation.

It is equally clear that ideas shape institutions and institutions repro-duce, mediate and change ideas. So, the dominant ideas of theIndustry section of the DTI stressed intervention and government aidto struggling manufacturing industry, but, as we shall see in Chapter 4,these dominant ideas were undermined by a combination of theincreased structural importance of Trade, as distinct from Industry, inthe DTI, together with the broader New Right ideas of theConservatives and the efforts of key DTI ministers. In a differentmanner, the Home Office, a powerful institution of the state, was ableto resist the increased role of New Right ideas during more than adecade of Conservative government.

These relationships between structure and agency and institutionsand ideas are interrelated and complex and cannot be resolved here.However, this book is informed by these debates and the questionsthey generate. We focus throughout on the role of structure, institu-tions, ideas, culture and agency and, even more importantly, upon therelationship between them. So, in our view, structure/institution andideas/culture constrain or facilitate agents, but agents interpret and canchange both structure and culture. As such, the relationship betweenstructure/institutions, including culture recognised as a structural con-straint, and agency is dialectical. At the same time, the relationshipbetween structure/institutions and ideas/culture is also dialectical. Thismeans that in this book, which focuses upon structural and culturalchange, we examine how structure/institutions change ideas/cultureand vice versa and also how both interact with agency. This inevitablymeans that we must operate with a historical perspective. Any dialect-ical relationship, by definition, involves constant iterations; aninteractive process which works out over time cannot be studied usinga short period.

The structure of the book

We have so much material that it is impossible to report all ourfindings in a single monograph. For this reason, the book focuses onstructural and cultural change in British central government chiefly inthe period between 1974 and 1997. As such, it only deals with policychange indirectly. At the same time, we also pay less attention to thoseissues that have been extensively covered by other authors. So, forexample, while there has been a great deal written on structural change


in British central government over the 1980s and 1990s, much lessattention has been paid to cultural change. For that reason, we havetwo chapters on cultural change and only one on structural change.Similarly, because Thain and Wright have dealt at length with relationsbetween the Treasury and departments, we examine that issue morebriefly, merely using our material to comment upon their conclusionsand highlight any putative changes in the Treasury’s role since theirstudy was published.

This book has eight substantive chapters. The first three deal withstructural and cultural change within British central governmentbroadly and more specifically upon change within our four depart-ments. Chapter 2 looks at cultural change across Whitehall beforeChapter 3 considers structural change in Whitehall and our depart-ments. Chapter 4 examines the impact of structural and culturalchange on our departments. Chapter 5 examines the role of depart-ments within the broader core executive. The next two chapters focusupon the role of the two most important sets of actors in departments.Chapter 6 highlights the change in the role of ministers over the last25 years before Chapter 7 concentrates upon the role of civil servants,although also paying some attention to the relations between thedepartments and Next Steps Agencies and the position of special advis-ers. The final two substantive chapters highlight the departments’ rela-tions outside Whitehall. Chapter 8 deals with relations with interestgroups, the media and the public, with the greatest focus on the first ofthese relationships. Chapter 9 then considers the changing pattern ofthe departments’ links with Europe. The conclusion will return to thequestion of the differentiated polity and the impact changes may havehad on the Westminster model.

Introduction 13

14

2Culture and Power in Whitehall

The notion of culture is central to any analysis of Whitehall andchange in departments. Most civil servants have a notion of culture; itis a mechanism through which they are socialised into a common con-ception of the Civil Service. Indeed, in reforming Whitehall, govern-ments have been concerned to create a departmental culture andmaintain a common Whitehall culture (see Radcliffe 1991; Mountfield1997; Richards 1997; Wilson 1999). This chapter has two aims: todevelop a theoretically informed account of the cultural change inWhitehall since the 1970s; and to examine the implications of this cul-tural change. It demonstrates how culture operates as a structural con-straint, but is also open to constant reinterpretation.

The concept of culture is particularly important for a number ofreasons:

• Culture ties together issues of behaviour and organisation; it is thelink between organisations, individual members’ beliefs about themand the way in which those members of the organisation act.Consequently, it is a concept which integrates both structure andagents. Agents are constrained by culture but it is their interpretationand reinterpretation of it which reproduces the cultural rules.

• The Civil Service appears to be a particularly culture-bound andrule-bound organisation with a well-defined and distinct culture.

• Culture is a power construct in the sense that it both reflects powerrelations – it is constitutive of power relations – and affects the waypeople behave by providing them with rules and partly constitutingtheir interests.

• Culture is reflective of, and reflected in, the behaviour of agents, thenature of institutions, the issues and processes within policy-makingand the power relationships within organisations. Past decisions,

Culture and Power in Whitehall 15

interests and institutions shape culture. They are not purelyideational, but are reflective of the structural context.

• Culture thus affects outcomes; both the behaviour of individuals inorganisations and the outputs from those organisations.

Culture is therefore a conceptual device for integrating structure andagency. Culture is a constraint on actors and, to some extent, it is areflection of past decisions and past actions. The Whitehall culture is amechanism for maintaining elite rule and is a reflection of, and reflectedin, the British political tradition. As we will see in the next chapter, it isalso a reflection of the functions and internal and external relationshipsof departments and the Civil Service. Nevertheless, culture is also repro-duced and recreated by the actions and interpretations of actors.Cultures often have ambiguous and multiple meanings and, therefore,are continually affected by actors’ perceptions and the negotiation ofcultural rules and values. Central to the reform process in Whitehall isthe belief that there needs to be a change in the culture.

Yet culture is a highly problematic term. First, it is difficult to defineculture and definitions are many and varied. Second, the relationshipbetween culture, organisations and behaviour is only partially andcrudely theorised. Third, culture tends to be a ‘dustbin’ concept; whatis left unexplained by other concepts is often accounted for by culture.Too often culture explains everything and nothing. The difficulty indefining culture and how it shapes behaviour often results in every-thing being seen as cultural.

Nevertheless, the argument of this chapter is that we can sensiblytalk about a Civil Service culture and, indeed, a departmental culture.Consequently, despite its complexity, it is a useful concept for explain-ing both the relationship between organisations and actions and thenature of the Civil Service. Our approach immediately raises a crucialproblem for all social sciences; are we using culture as an independentor a dependent variable? Are we using culture to explain the behaviourof the Civil Service or are we trying to explain changes in the culture ofthe Civil Service? To put it another way, are we developing a theory ofculture or a cultural theory? The answer, of course, is both: culturehelps shape the nature of the Civil Service and, in that sense, is a usefulindependent variable; however, if we are trying to establish whetherand why the culture of the Civil Service has changed, then we aretreating it as a dependent variable.

This chapter is divided into three substantive sections. In the firstsection, we briefly outline the cultural theory approach to the study of


1 Although positivists are highly critical of rational choice theory for introduc-ing human motivations, see Zey (1998) and Donaldson (1996).

culture before outlining our own position. The second section then exam-ines the nature of the Whitehall culture and the relationship betweenpower, organisation and culture. Finally, we focus on the putativechanges that occurred in Whitehall culture over the last 25 years.

Culture as a concept

Traditionally, organisational literature and management science havepaid little attention to culture, instead adopting positivist accountswhich focus on the nature of organisations as institutional structures(see Donaldson 1996: 1). In particular, rational choice theory attemptsto build positivist, predictive, models of behaviour, focusing upon themotivations and actions of individuals. However, they largely ignorethe issue of culture.1

Cultural theory

An initially more attractive behavioural approach to culture is culturaltheory as developed by Douglas (1982) and Thompson, Ellis andWildavsky (1990) (for applications and reviews see: Bale 1999; Hood1990, 1998; Jensen 1998). Cultural theorists suggest that individuals havedistinct ways of life which are defined in relation to two axes: grid andgroup. The concept grid refers to the extent to which behaviour is rule-bound rather than open to negotiation; so a strong grid indicates theexistence of rigid rules or norms over behaviour. The concept group refersto the degree of integration in a social organisation. A matrix based uponthese two scales produces four ways of life (see Fig 2.1).

As Jensen (1998: 121) summarises:

cultural theory understands any social system as an interactiveblend of four analytically distinct and empirically experienceableways of life produced by ways of social organisations. The stabilityof the social system is due to the latent functions of actors defend-ing their taken for granted world views. System changes are due tothe ‘cumulative impact of successive anomalies or surprises thatforce individuals to search around for alternative ways of life thatcan provide a more satisfying fit with the world as it is’ (Thompsonet al. 1990: 69).


Figure 2.1 A matrix of ways of life

GroupHigh

Hierarchy Egalitarianism

Grid LowHigh

Fatalism Individualism

LowHood has applied this approach to produce a categorisation of ‘fourgeneric organisational ways of life’ which affect the control of publicbureaucracy.

Contrived randomness links to the fatalist cultural bias; review is aform of control related to the hierarchist’s way of life; mutuality linksto the egalitarian cultural bias; and competition is an approach tocontrol related to the individualist way of life. (Hood 1990: 210)

Cultural theory is an advance on the managerial and organisationalapproaches, emphasising the way in which cultural values shapebehaviour and options. However, this approach has problems. First,specifying just four ways of life seems unnecessarily reductive andoverly simplistic. The numbers of ways of life are in fact infinite. Moreimportantly, organisations like the Civil Service, which are highly cul-turally bound, contain competing ways of life. The Treasury, forexample, is in many ways a highly rule-bound organisation with astrong sense of group and position; in that sense it is hierarchical. Atthe same time, in terms of the way the policy process operates and therelationships which exist within the Treasury, it has important egali-tarian elements. Second, it is not clear what cultural theory adds toour understanding of organisations. Is cultural theory necessary todevelop the forms of control Hood outlines? It tells us that there arefour (and only four) competing ways of life but not much else. Third,cultural theory offers a predictive theory about how people with par-ticular ways of life will behave. However, what it actually develops is apost-hoc rationalisation, ascribing a way of life to the behaviour ofcertain groups. As such, the criteria for establishing whether someoneis a fatalist or an egalitarian involves imputing motives for actions.Similarly, the level of analysis involved is unclear: is the focus theindividual or the organisation? Likewise, as Jenson (1998: 36) high-lights, the theory fails to indicate the mechanisms for identifying theboundaries of an organisation. These problems are compounded


because cultural theory sees individuals as continually recreating insti-tutions, whilst individuals are also moving across different ways oflife. How, then, are we to see these ways of life as explanations ofbehaviour when they are so amorphous and fragile; how do we knowwhich way of life is shaping individual actions at a particular time? Itis also an anomaly that egalitarian ways of life are seen as not beinghighly rule-bound.

Cultural theory does not, from our perspective, provide an adequateor particularly useful theorisation of culture. A culture may constitute away of life but it also constitutes a system of power which is linked toorganisational structures and it is this relationship between culture,power and structure that we wish to explore.

Beyond cultural theory

As such, while behavioural theory sees culture as functional – it is thereto facilitate organisational goals – cultural theory sees it as totalising –it is a way of life. For us, cultures are sets of values, rules and beliefswhich operate within a particular organisational context. In the sensethat organisations are metaphors, culture creates a thread of beliefswhich hold the organisational elements together despite numerousintersections of networks and hierarchies some of which may be spa-tially – in terms of hierarchy and geography – far from the core of theorganisation. As culture, and organisations, are social creations they areboth the institutionalisation of past patterns of behaviour and therecreation and reformulation of new ways of behaving. In this sense,culture is not a ‘corporate culture’ imposed from above – although thatcould be part of the culture – rather it is competing sets of changingvalues fighting for dominance in Whitehall departments or sections orsubsections of departments. Meyerson (1991: 259) sees culture as amechanism for acknowledging ambiguity. Quoting Clifford (1983) shepoints out: ‘A “culture” is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogueof subcultures, insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions.’

At the same time, cultures are systems of power because they involvemechanisms for defining relationships and privileging certain valuesand forms of behaviour over others. In this way competing cultures,and subcultures, can be seen as different forms of what Foucault con-ceptualised as power/knowledge. Thus, a culture, or ‘common under-standing’, is based on a shared sense of knowledge:

Common sense knowledge of the facts of social life for the membersof the society is institutionalized knowledge of the real world. Not


2 Similar approaches have been developed within so-called ‘new institutional-ism’ (March and Olsen 1984; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Lowndes 1997).They reject rational choice notions of agent choice preferring the idea oftaken-for-granted expectations, assuming that ‘actors associate certainactions with certain situations by rules of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen1984: 741) absorbed through socialisation, education, on the job learning, oracquiescence to convention (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 10).

For new institutionalism action is structured through a ‘shared system ofrules that both constrain the inclination and capacity of actors to optimizeas well as privilege some groups whose interests are secured by prevailingrewards and sanctions’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 11). New institutional-ism recognises the way in which the values of organisations sustain organisa-tions but do so in a way that privileges certain outcomes and so culture ispower. Organisations are not formal institutions but ‘normative obligations’which develop as facts and so are enstructured as institutionalised behav-iour. It is through institutionalisation that subject becomes object (see Bergerand Luckman 1967; Giddens 1986).

only does common sense knowledge portray a real society formembers, but in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy the fea-tures of the real society are produced by a person’s motivated com-pliance with these background expectancies. (Garfinkel 1967: 53)

The central assumption is that organisations are socially created – theproduct of the intended and unintended consequence of human choiceand action – and, consequently, ‘organisations are culture bearingmilieus’ (Frost et al. 1983: 21) because they are the site of social interac-tion which is bound by sets of rules, values, norms and beliefs. In thisway, the notion of culture can bind agent-orientated and structuralist per-spectives. It is agency-based in two senses: it sees values and understand-ings as being affected by particular cultures, thus questioning the notionof an ‘objective’ culture-free truth; and it sees culture as a social construc-tion that is continually produced and reproduced and institutionalisedthrough the behaviour of humans (Berger and Luckman 1967). However,this institutionalisation of patterns of behaviour introduces an importantstructural element in that culture exists independently of individualagents and so the agents’ cultural norms appear as an object (Berger andLuckman 1967). As Riley (1983: 420) points out: ‘The structuring pro-cesses interpenetrate and create complex institutional patterns. Thus,structuration is grounded in individual actions that over time/space con-stitute institutions.’ Clearly, the ‘Whitehall culture’ imposes severe con-straints on the behaviour of officials to the extent that they adopt verysimilar modes of personal behaviour; for example, the use of the word‘chap’.2


In seeing culture and organisations from a perspective which recog-nises the duality of structure and agency, we shift from the idea of ahierarchically imposed, uniform culture to the notion of sociallycreated, ambiguous, and relatively open, culture which, nevertheless, isan important constraint on the behaviour of actors. Consequently, wehave to accept the idea that organisations, particularly large ones, willbe replete with sub-cultures and overlapping cultures. Most organisa-tions are part of wider sub-sets of organisations and broader socialsystems. The local Benefits Office is within the Benefits Agency that islinked to the benefits section of the DSS which is part of Whitehallwhich is in turn a key institution within the state. Each section willhave its own culture reflecting its tasks, history, relationships andactors, but, at the same time, it will be influenced by the cultures of itswider networks. One DSS official reported ‘considerable differences’between the culture of the department and its largest agency, theBenefits Agency:

One key thing is the way that agencies think and do things differ-ently. They are very much into delegating tasks downwards to thelowest level, so responsibility is found more at lower levels. But, inthe policy unit we are quite small but deal with ministers and thestuff which is salient politically. Whereas in an agency the stuff isoperational, so it is not so sensitive and there is a different approachto all the work because of that.

For Van Maanen and Barley (1984: 40): ‘To the extent that segmenta-tion is accepted as natural and appropriate, differentially integratingrole clusters emerge. As each develops its own language, norms, timehorizons and perspectives on the organisation’s mission, subcultureproliferation should be expected.’ At the same time, even withintightly defined organisations, there is a strong tendency for sub-unitsto define themselves by identifying an ‘other’ and creating a distinctiveculture (Young 1991). In this vein, Michael Bichard, the former ChiefExecutive of the Benefits Agency, felt that creating a distinct culturewithin the Benefits Agency was necessary for the smooth functioningof the organisation (Walker 1999: 29).

Within Whitehall, the Treasury has a sense of its own superiority(see Kogan 1971; Young and Sloman 1982; Haines 1977). Similarly,within the Foreign Office, one senior official was prepared to say thatthe West Africa section does not attract: ‘the brightest and the best in


3 Again this raises the issues, not discussed in this book, of how the elite ofWhitehall can impose its culture on the rest and how there is considerablespace for subversion in the lower levels. To some extent, the inability of theadministrative class to create a unified culture demonstrates why agenciesare so satisfactory for them.

the Foreign Office’ (The Times, 12 May 1998). The absence of a unifiedculture, and the consequent existence of overlapping cultures, meanswe cannot speak to the leaders of an organisation and see their view asrepresentative of the organisational culture. We also have to be carefulthat what we see as representing a particular organisational culture isnot actually part of the wider social or political culture in which theorganisation operates (Louis 1985).

Culture is fragmented into vertical sub-systems and hierarchy. Thoseat the top of an organisation can have differing cultures from those atthe bottom. For example, although they are both civil servants, theCabinet Secretary has a different world-view from someone deliveringbenefits in the Benefits Agency. A structurationist perspective suggeststhat it may be the level of social integration in the dominant groupswhich is important and therefore: ‘distinct subgroups in organisationscould easily lead to the existence of subcultures that adhere to differentvalues’ (Riley 1983: 417).3 As Louis (1985: 79) argues:

The (top of the) organisation, vertical and horizontal slices, andother formal unit designations (such as department) all representtypical sites in and through which cultures may develop. Some rele-vant properties of organisations, and of these sites in particular as‘culture-bearing milieus’, are: they are regularly convening settings;they impose structural interdependencies among people performingtasks; they provide opportunities for affiliation and the constitutionconstellations of interest or purposes. As such, they serve as breed-ing grounds, if you will, for the emergence of local shared meanings.

Further fragmentation is apparent when we consider the elements ofculture and its relationship with organisation. Culture can be seen inthree elements which are separate, but mutually reinforcing. First, theyare ‘webs of meaning’ (Smircich 1983: 63). The web of meaningincludes values about what is good and bad, acceptable and unaccept-able and in and out of the culture. Essentially, it is a language that is


common to all who share the culture and often not understood, ormisunderstood, by those who are excluded.

Second, it includes actions; the values affect the behaviour of agentswho have to act according to particular rules. These rules eliminatecertain actions and include others. In acting, individuals are creating aperformance which ‘effectively projects a definition of the situation’(Goffman 1969: 24). Cultures are sustained by the performances ofactors operating within culturally bound rules. According to Goffman(1969: 24):

We must not overlook the crucial fact that any projected definitionof the situation also has a distinctive moral character of projections… Society is organised on the principle that any individual whopossesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expectthat others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.Connected with this principle is a second, namely that an individ-ual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has a certain socialcharacteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is. In conse-quence, when an individual projects a definition of the situationand thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of aparticular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon theothers, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that aperson of his kind have a right to expect.

Civil servants recreate a culturally bound moral universe which underpins their distinct and well-defined performances and creates expectation of how ‘others’, whether politicians or citizens, act.Understandings of the world often occur without full awareness oftheir existence and this leads to ambiguities and sometimes confu-sions. It is often the failure of politicians to act in an expected manner(rather than simple conflicts of interest) that create ‘embarrassment’, touse Goffman’s term, between officials and ministers. For example, suchembarrassments are apparent in the cases of Tony Benn and MichaelHoward (see below and Chapter 6).

Goffman also argues that performers often have ‘an idealized view ofthe situation’ (Goffman 1969: 44). This has particular resonance whenanalysing civil servants. In their performance, civil servants incorpo-rate the official view of themselves and represent themselves as apoliti-cal, neutral and with little real influence. Their own interpretation ofthe role of a civil servant is an idealised one. In this sense, the perfor-mance accentuates, or distils, the essence of the nature of the task, thus


4 This also raises important methodological issues when the civil servantspresent to the interviewer an idealised ‘performance’. This happened on anumber of occasions when an official would not comment on the relation-ship with ministers or accept they had any influence. It could also be presentin the manner of interview, where a number were diffident and concerned toprotect traditional notions of the role of a mandarin. The solution to thisproblem lies in interpreting the actor’s perceptions (see below).

reinforcing the cultured patterns of behaviour by making them moreidentifiable. Civil servants will act more like civil servants in front of aSelect Committee than they will in an official interdepartmental com-mittee dealing with export licences4 for arms. Goffman highlights thatwhat seems the normal moral order is in fact a social construction (seeGarfinkel 1967) and the assumptions of this normal order containimportant implications for the nature of power. Thus, in looking atculture we are trying to understand what the shared ‘common under-standings’ mean.

By emphasising the role and performance of the actor we are focus-ing on agency; a focus which is largely ignored except in the rationalchoice literature (see Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Smith 1998). Inattempting to understand action, we can follow the ethnomethodolo-gists and adopt an approach which seeks to understand the origins andcontent of the actors’ perceptions of the world. In this sense, notionsof culture are linked to the actions of actors because the choices theseactors make are linked to their cultural universe that serves as a guideto, but not a determinant of, action. In this vein, it is impossible tounderstand the actions of civil servants from a purely objective stand-point; this is the failure of rational choice theory. We have to under-stand their subjective perceptions of the world. However, as Powell andDiMaggio argue, ethnomethodology fails to explain why actors sustainthese structures, how they produce or reproduce social order and whatis the origin and role of actors’ interests. Consequently, a theory ofaction is of little utility without a theory of power.

The relationship between cultures and institutions is also crucialfor our study. Culture creates institutions and institutions reinforcethe culture. Thus, culture is Janus-faced; it looks inwards, definingthe relationships and rules of engagement between actors, and itlooks outwards, defining the ‘other’ and creating barriers to inclusionin the institution (see Fig. 2.2). Organisations are the sources ofsocialisation which imbue actors with cultures. As a number of


What is good and badWho is good and bad What is acceptable andunacceptableDefining self-perceptionand perception of othersand what is other.

PerformanceAction according to therulesSet patterns of behaviour(for example in relationto a minister or in frontof a select committee)

Organisational elementssuch as processes ofselection; socialisationand inclusion andexclusion which bothdefine the self and otherand reinforce the valuesand actions oforganisational members

Figure 2.2 Elements of culture

Values Actions Institutions

writers suggest, organisations often have symbols and myths thatreinforce the culture of the organisation.

This notion of culture and its relationship to organisation and actionleads us to what Benson (1977: 6) called a dialectical view:

Any organisation as part of the social world is always in a state ofbecoming; it is not a fixed and determinate entity. Its main features,goals, structural arrangements, technology, informal relations, andso on – are the outcroppings of the process of social construction.The dialectical perspective focuses attention upon this processthrough which a specific organisational form has been produced,the mechanisms through which an established form is maintained(or reproduced), and its continuous reconstruction.

Thus, organisations and their interrelationships are continually beingreproduced through the actions of agents within an organisation butthose actions are structured by the values and relationships whichreinforce the institution. For Benson, organisations have a morphol-ogy which is the official view of the organisation and it may be seenas an accurate representation of the organisation. Essentially, forBenson, organisations are about power and we need to examine thepower base.

Culture and power

In shaping how people see themselves, see others, conceive of theworld (as an empirical object), relate to others (inside and outside the


organisation) and define the limits of the acceptable in terms of behav-iour and decisions, culture is a form of power. It shapes behaviour (it isaffective), but it also constitutes relationships and perceptions, and it isthrough this constitution that power exists (Dyrberg 1997). Carruthers(1994: 23) points out how cultures create legitimacy for groups whichcan allow greater autonomy in their behaviour, citing the example ofthe prevalence of the Treasury view in the interwar years in allowingits perspective to dominate economic choices in the face of depression.

There are numerous ways in which culture can be conceived of aspower. In the most literal sense it creates a system of acceptable behav-iour which encourages the workforce to behave in a particular fashion.Moreover, from this perspective, culture is a source of discipline whichdoes not have to be hierarchically imposed because fellow workers maysay, ‘this is not the way things are done around here’ (Louis 1985).However, this notion of culture as power is exogenous. It is imposedon actors as a form of discipline.

A second conceptualisation of culture as power focuses upon structuration whereby structures create systems of legitimation anddomination. This conceptualisation emphasises that unintended con-sequences of past actions can constrain actions in the future. As such,organisational culture explains how ‘symbolic orders sustain the formsof domination’ in the ‘everyday context of lived experience’. It isthrough an organisation’s ‘political image’ which is ‘composed ofdeeply embedded master structures’ that ‘the organisation’s, or sub-group’s, political self-definition … embody the rules that guide politi-cal actions and the chronic political habits that are mindlessly enacted’(Riley 1983: 418).

However, accounts of this sort, derived from Giddens, only focusupon half the picture. A structural account, following Berger andLuckman, emphasise how actions, rules and norms become institution-alised. In our view, the notion of culture implies more than this; weneed to break down the division between dominator and dominatedand focus upon how culture constitutes action. Culture is not an exter-nal set of institutions but, in Garfinkel’s terms, it is common sense; itconstitutes the actor’s understanding of the world both as a system ofknowledge and as an interlinked system of ethics which both derivesfrom and legitimises the knowledge. As Burrell argues: ‘Our knowledgeof reality is enmeshed in a power field’ (Burrell 1998: 17). This viewcomes close to a Foucauldian perspective because it suggests that whatis seen as truth and knowledge is a system of discipline and that thisknowledge ‘cannot be divorced from techniques of normalisation


which structure through and discourse into mutually exclusive cate-gories’ (McKinlay and Starkey 1998: 1). For Foucault:

there is no power relation without the correlative constitutions of afield of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presupposeand constitute at the same time power relations … the subject whoknows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledgemust be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implica-tions of power knowledge. (Foucault 1977: 27–8).

Unlike traditional approaches, this perspective suggests that CivilService power is not merely reflected in the exercise of dominationover ministers, or other civil servants or outside actors, but, rather, isconstituted in the very definition of the role of the Civil Service and inall the attendant cultural baggage.

For Foucault power is everywhere and infects superordinates as muchas subordinates (Burrell 1998). It is within, rather than above, thesubject (Clegg 1998; Dyrberg 1997). Foucault also rejects the notionthat subjects have an essence that exists outside of ‘discursive practices’.This explains the importance of culture; it is the discursive practice thatdefines knowledge, rules, behaviour, membership and performance. Byinculcating the culture, actors are adopting the method of dominationwhich shapes the way they behave and how they act. The importantpoint, as Dyrberg (1997) indicates, is that both structure and agency arealso constituted by power and, therefore, we cannot see power as some-thing that exists outside of the individual. For Dyrberg power cannotexist prior to the individual and therefore power:

must be studied as an immanent process, that is, in the becoming ofidentity. … The techniques of disciplining and regulation bothtrigger and embody power and knowledge which mutually condi-tion each other and form a constitutive part of the political authori-sation of power. In this scenario power cannot be understand asessentially oppressive. (Dyrberg 1997: 87).

From this perspective, power is not monolithic and unified but a set ofshifting and unstable networks and alliances (Clegg 1998: 31). Cultureis a process of discipline and surveillance; it inculcates sets of behav-iour and expectations of action; to break with the Civil Service culture


is to break the rules of the game but officials are so well imbued withthe culture that they rarely break it. For Clegg (1998: 41):

Power inscribes itself within contextual ‘rules of the game’ that bothenable and constrain action. These rules form the underlying ratio-nale of those calculations that agencies routinely make in organisa-tional contexts. Action designates itself as such-and-such an actionby reference to rules that identify it as such. Such rules can never befree of surpluses of ambiguous meaning: they are always indexical tothe context of the interpreters and interpretation.

Therefore, despite a relatively well-honed system of socialisation forboth officials and ministers conflicts of interpretation can arise, as boththe Arms to Iraq and Sandline affairs testify (Scott 1996; Legg and Ibbs1998). These conflicts are more likely to occur between ministers andofficials than between officials, because ministers and officials have dif-ferent power interests and alternative moral universes and so consti-tute themselves in varying ways. Consequently, there is no single, set,culture but several in a continual process of flux and negotiation. Thisconceptualisation of power (which does not necessarily operate in allrelationships) as not involving dominance helps to explain howofficials, despite considerable resources, accept the authority of minis-ters and ministers, who have great authority, do not always achievetheir goals. However, unlike postmodernist approaches, we suggest thatculture is not purely ideational but reflective of the material interestsand structural position of Whitehall. It is a reflection of the attempt tomaintain rules and the specific institutional interests of departmentsand their functions.

The Whitehall culture

Whitehall has a particularly clear and well-defined culture. Civilservants operate in and are constituted by a culturally bound universe(see Dale 1941; Heclo and Wildavsky 1981; Thain and Wright 1995).This culture constitutes the nature of the Civil Service, how they act,their relationships and what they do; it is the source of their power.Unlike most organisational cultures, Civil Service culture is less con-cerned with defining relationships between civil servants, although itdoes do that, than with defining the ‘other’, whether the ‘other’ ispoliticians or the public. Civil Service culture is very much concerned


with boundaries: who is and who is not a civil servant – witness thearguments over the role of Jonathan Powell; what is public andprivate; who should and should not be allowed into the centres ofpolicy-making; and who should and should not be given access toofficial papers. The rules concerning who has access are very muchtied to the culture. For instance, in an interview following his retire-ment from the Civil Service, the former Cabinet Secretary, RobinButler, warned that the influx of political advisers and increasingopenness were diluting the professionalism of Civil Service advice(The Guardian, 5 January 1997).

From this perspective, Civil Service power is not something that isexercised against ministers but is constituted in the Civil Serviceculture, with its particular rules of behaviour, ethics and knowledge.Civil servants have a clear set of ethics that are based on the notionsof integrity, objectivity and neutrality. It is this ethical positionwhich is the basis of their power. Officials define and controlobjective knowledge – they define who knows and what is knownand the modalities of the knowledge – and it is this control, andindeed construction, of knowledge which gives them power. Becauseit is based on ‘fact’, neutrality and integrity, it is difficult forministers to challenge this information without being seen asdifficult or dogmatic. Because much of it is secret and presented interms of the public interest, it is very difficult for the public or out-siders to challenge (on issues of accountability see Flinders 2000).Civil servants also carry this system of knowledge to the ministerand, as such, define his/her role. This, in turn, sustains the officialand can often limit the minister.

However, a number of crucial points distinguish our interpretationof culture from that of constructivists who see the world as a puresocial creation of competing interpretations. Culture is not purely aself-referential and continually changing set of meanings but is areflection of the historical and institutional context of the British state.The culture of present-day civil servants and ministers is affected bythe development of institutions evolved through a conception of gov-ernment which is representative rather than participatory (see Judge1999). The culture reproduces the elite nature of the British politicalsystem which, in turn, is reinforced by the British political tradition ofelitist, secretive and closed government (Kenny 1999; Marsh 2001;Marsh, Richards and Smith 2001). The culture derives from the cre-ation of departments in the nineteenth century which ensured thatdecisions were locked into a Whitehall system where ministers adopted


the prerogative of the Crown (Smith 1999b). Thus, the British politicaltradition sees certain agents as important for governing and, in thissense, ensures that power is located within the core executive. As such,culture is a system of power that both reflects and reinforces existinginstitutions and histories.

One can see this process in the way the words of current Labourministers frequently vary little from those of their Conservative pre-decessors. For example, a recent leaked memo from the Health andSafety Executive named four individuals who made ‘persistent …enquiries to the HSE’. It stated that the HSE wished to monitor thosewho have an interest in the HSE and suggested that their activitiesshould be reported to the Open Government Unit. When the respon-sible minister, Angela Eagle, was pressed on this point in Parliamentshe responded: ‘The purpose of the memoranda is to ensure that thenamed enquirers get all the information they required’ (The Guardian,21 May 1998). Rather than criticise her department and question theofficials involved, she adopted the ‘official’ line and defended theDepartment. She adopted the correct role for a minister. This casedidn’t involve officials tricking or conspiring against a minister;rather, the officials and the minister shared a view of their ‘proper’roles. However, as we shall see below, this is not to suggest that thereis a single, unified culture in Whitehall; indeed, the existence of com-peting cultures may have been made greater by the post-1979 reformprocess.

The system of power/knowledge which underpins the role of officialsis effectively self-regulating. There is no Civil Service act in Britaindefining the duties of officials and, therefore, any putative transgres-sion of Civil Service norms is adjudicated not by external actors but bythe Head of the Home Civil Service, the Cabinet Secretary. Of course,there is some ambiguity about what would constitute improper behav-iour by officials (Chapman 1988). For example, is it improper for anofficial to whistle-blow to another department or to Parliament ifhe/she feels a minister is acting improperly? Many officials think it isunacceptable (see Barker and Wilson 1997). Indeed, Chapman (1988:305) quotes the Establishment’s Officer’s Guide which highlights thecomplacency of the official view of ethics:

(It has never been) thought necessary to lay down a precise code ofconduct because civil servants jealously maintain their professionalstandards. In practice, the distinctive character of the British CivilService depends on the existence and maintenance of a general code


of conduct which, although to some extent intangible and unwrit-ten, is of very real influence.

In Chapman’s view, control is exercised largely though the process ofsocialisation and the role of leading civil servants. It is perhaps indicativeof the approach of these leaders that one of them, William Armstrong,could say, without irony, that he was accountable to himself, a greattaskmaster: ‘I am accountable to my own ideal of a civil servant’ (quotedin Chapman 1988: 306). In failing to challenge this perception, ministersare consequently involved in the recreation of the civil servants’ powerwhich is not against the minister but against those outside of Whitehall.In a way, it is the minister and the relationship with the minister, thatdefines, and is defined by, Civil Service culture.

It is important, however, to recognise that, despite its relativeunity, Civil Service culture is not monolithic. Within the broad CivilService universe there are different cultures linked to institutions.Although it is well-bounded, the culture does not exist indepen-dently of the rest of the world. Therefore, the subcultures within theWhitehall world reflect the wider political world. At the macro-levelthere is a political culture which reflects both paternalisticConservatism and British, Fabian-influenced, social democracy andpromotes a deferential culture built on the notion that ‘Whitehallknows best’ and that officials can be trusted to act in the public good.This means that officials can be left to ‘get on with it’ and that theprocess of decision-making should remain secret because officials canbe trusted and only they can really make a proper judgement; releaseof full information, it is frequently argued, will lead to misunder-standing because the public cannot judge the evidence or the argu-ments properly (see Scott (1996); Salmonella in eggs (Smith 1991)and BSE (Phillips 2000)). This emphasis upon ministers and civil ser-vants ‘knowing best’ and upon the related need for secrecy is perhapsthe key feature of the British political tradition.

What is interesting is that, because there is no written constitution,there is no binding, legal document which formally outlines the dutiesand responsibilities of officials. Neither is there any explicit statementabout the basis upon which officials should make ethical and profes-sional judgements. Quite clearly, the readily accepted view inWestminster/Whitehall circles has been that the distinctive characterof the British Civil Service has been based on a general code or ethos,which, although unwritten and almost mystical in character, is, never-theless, very real and powerful. They define and reproduce the culturethemselves.


A key notion of the Whitehall culture is the public service ethos.Officials have traditionally been perceived, by their political masters,as exhibiting great integrity. This, in turn, has enabled public ser-vants to be regarded as politically neutral actors. Although thepublic service ethos has never been formally codified (indeed, due toits intangible nature, it cannot be) it has, until recently, established and re-confirmed the three mantras on which the modern day Civil Service was established – neutrality, anonymity and perma-nence. In so doing, the central pillar of the Whitehall culture – thepublic service ethos – has enabled officials to act in such a way as toprovide an effective check on ministerial power. This has been one of their most fundamental roles and is at the heart of theWhitehall/Westminster system.

Whitehall culture: the case of Tony Benn

The strength and importance of Whitehall culture and the way itdefines and restricts behaviour is well illustrated by the case of TonyBenn. Here, conflicts of interpretation of roles and values revealed thecultural limits upon behaviour. When Benn was a cabinet ministerbetween 1974 and 1976 he effectively refused to play by the ‘rules ofthe game’ vis-à-vis his colleagues or the Civil Service. Consequently,the process of co-operation broke down and Benn was frustrated in hispolicy goals.

The breakdown in these relationships occurred for a number ofreasons. Benn felt that the Civil Service would serve ministers effec-tively only if they did not rock the boat. He believed that civil ser-vants think:

that the continuity of government works within the Departmentand then people come in and stay for a year or two in the bridalsuite in the Grand Hotel and they still run it. I think they do thinkthat and it’s your job not to get angry about that but to shift it.

Benn suggested that the Civil Service did not like the fact that hewanted to implement the manifesto commitments. They saw it as a‘funny little advertising’ brochure and ‘the term “Bennery” wasinvented either by the Treasury or the Permanent Secretary of mydepartment to try to stop me. They were feeding out all thisBennery’. Consequently, the trust which is crucial to the civilservant–ministerial relationship was lost.

Benn broke three cardinal rules of the Whitehall culture. First, he didnot trust his officials. In the words of one former DTI official: ‘he had


reached the view that the bureaucracy was against him, so it was anembattled situation’. Similarly, a former Permanent Secretary in DTIsaid: ‘He didn’t use the Department. Partly I suppose because he didn’ttrust it.’ Second, he did not accept their interpretation of the ‘facts’ – inthis sense he was operating within an alternative power/knowledgeframework based on his conception of socialism and his view that thecrucial role of the minister was to implement party policy. Third, helooked to alternative sources of advice. Because Benn did not alwaystrust his officials he consulted with both the trade unions and hisspecial advisers Frances Morrell and Francis Cripps who provided thesupport which was not coming from the Department. Benn not onlytalked to the unions but was prepared to show them Civil Service briefsand get their reaction, although, as one official admitted: ‘Of course itdidn’t do him any good, because we immediately started writing differ-ent kinds of briefs.’

A former DTI official accurately summed up the departmental view ofBenn:

He was completely irrational by then, and used to do extraordi-nary things like, for example, having a meeting with trade unions,which he was very keen on, and chucking his departmental briefacross the table to the trade unions saying, ‘Well that is what myofficials are telling me, I don’t believe a word of it, what do youthink?’

From Benn’s perspective: ‘the idea that the people at work had anyright in policy making was absolutely foreign to (the Civil Service)’.Indeed, he was highlighting an important Civil Service norm whichemphasises that they are the policy advisers. It is interesting that anofficial sees it as ‘irrational’ and ‘extraordinary’ that a minister wouldshow briefs to outsiders and ask their views.

Benn also recalls that, on one occasion, his Permanent Secretarydrafted a paper which failed to reflect Benn’s view and, as such, clearlybroke a rule of the game: ‘So I handed it to Frances Morrell and FrancisCripps, and they drafted the papers. Then my Permanent Secretarywent round all the other Permanent Secretaries to try to get it stopped.’The use of these advisers was distressing to officials, as one observed:

He had these rather pernicious political advisers and he discussedthings with them and told them what he was doing and what he


wanted to do and so on, but he didn’t always tell officials, so it wasvery difficult to know exactly what was happening.

This quote illustrates a crucial element of Civil Service culture; it isofficials who are supposed to be the confidants of ministers and theirclosest political advisers. Civil servants want to be, and feel theyshould be, close to the hub of ministerial policy-making. Benn broke arule of the game by not being close to his officials; he should havetrusted them and kept them in the inner circle while the outside worldof unions and special advisers were relegated to the outer ring.

These conflicts were exacerbated by Benn’s reading of the roles of aminister. He combined two contradictory elements in his interpreta-tion. On the one hand, he believed that he was there to implementparty policy and so, unlike most ministers, his legitimacy derived notfrom Parliament or the Cabinet, but from the Party and the manifesto.On the other hand, he retained the constitutional notion of ministerialauthority and responsibility; he believed that officials should do whathe told them to do. Generally, officials are culturally bound to be loyal.But loyalty is offered in exchange for trust and involvement and,because Benn excluded and distrusted his officials, and as he did notabide by their rules, they withdrew their loyalty. As another formerDTI official, later a Permanent Secretary admitted:

Whereas other ideological ministers I’ve worked for, not all of them,but certainly some of them, Tebbit and Ridley for example, and alsoJoseph, were sophisticated enough to see that bureaucrats are notagainst ministers. And that bureaucrats taken into confidence andtrusted will do their damnedest to deliver a radical programme.

The shock of Benn’s refusal to play by the rules is apparent in the atti-tude of officials to him. One former DTI official said: ‘Benn was mad, orat any rate irrational.’ Another derided him as ‘a very peculiar characterindeed’. A third argued that, in the 1970s ‘He got much more radical andmuch more unreasonable.’ It was Benn’s failure to abide by their rules ofthe game, which meant he was seen as ‘mad’ or ‘irrational’ or, at the veryleast, unreasonable. One Energy official made a revealing point:

To me coming in from outside, from the Coal Board, where youwere always arguing hopeless causes anyway, it was natural that yougave a brief that your minister wanted without any consideration as


to how it would fare with the Treasury. But that was not the cultureat the time in the seventies where there was a feeling that there wasa madman on our hands who I must isolate and cool down and theTreasury were putting a lot of pressure on the Department of Energycivil servants to just control him and try and knock some of the bat-tiness out of his ideas.

Benn’s problem with his civil servants would not have been so difficultif he had sustained good relations with the Cabinet and the PrimeMinister. In fact, officials could justify their disloyalty to Benn in termsof their loyalty to government as a whole and, in doing so, draw uponthe doctrine of ‘collective responsibility’. The argument of officials wasthat Benn was not following policy agreed by colleagues. Typically, oneofficial said that Benn would agree a line in a Cabinet committee andthen argue against that position in full Cabinet. Similarly, a formerPermanent Secretary said: ‘He worked inside the Department verymuch against his colleagues and against Harold Wilson.’ His formerCabinet colleagues concurred. One claimed: ‘Benn had one or twoallies in the Cabinet but he was largely isolated. His contributions toCabinet were always nonsense but they did give us a good laugh.’Another said his contribution had no clout in Cabinet, ‘none at all’.Thus, in Civil Service terms, officials were not undermining the rules ofthe game.

The Benn case is significant because of what it reveals about thenature of Civil Service culture. It indicates the boundaries of acceptablebehaviour. In the Whitehall world of the 1970s, officials expected to beincluded. Their role is to present the minister with the limits of thepossible and a minister who does not recognise their limits is mad orirrational. To quote one official:

Benn was not thwarted exactly. He was subjected to a good deal ofadvice which he found unwelcome. The job of the Civil Service is,as best it can, to point out the realities of the situation to ministers.

Despite the formal constitutional position that ministers decide,officials believe that policy (or realistic policy) cannot be madewithout them. Benn undermined the relationships of dependencewhich officials saw as crucial to their professional integrity and self-image. Benn also highlights the role of loyalty in official culture.Loyalty for officials is multi-faceted. They are loyal to the corp of theCivil Service, to the government, to the Department and to the min-


ister. In this sense, they always have conflicting loyalties. On oneside, they have loyalty to their political masters, the government andministers. This loyalty is part of an important exchange relationshipbecause without political support officials cannot act. However, as wesaw in the Benn case, loyalty to the government and to a ministercan conflict. Officials also have loyalty to the Civil Service and theirdepartment. In the Benn case, the argument of the officials was thatthey were being loyal to the government, but, from Benn’s perspec-tive, they were protecting departmental interests in certain policies.However, perhaps what is most startling in this episode is howloyalty to the minister broke down and whilst this has happened onother occassions, with Michael Howard and the Home Office beingperhaps the prime other example, it is rare. One senior official didreveal that an official in Energy:

… saw his obligation to the Wilson administration and if hethought that Benn was doing crazy things then he had no com-punction in going to talk to his mates in the Treasury or theCabinet Office to see if other ministers could be persuaded in a suit-able way to stop him. And to some extent that goes on now (1997).It is usually pretty covert.

These conflicts of loyalty did cause problems. In particular, the role ofthe minister’s private office is to protect the minister and to be his/hereyes and ears in Whitehall. The strength of this loyalty is highlightedby the Benn case because his private office remained loyal. One formerprivate secretary revealed the problems this created:

We had to provide the Secretary of State with the best informationwe could. My recollection was that I served the Secretary of State butnot necessarily the government as a whole. It’s a question of whereyour loyalties lie. But it was difficult as you had this hostility andtension between Tony Benn and the top officials in the Department.It was bizarre at moments and I can remember one particular daywhen Tony Benn went off and the Department had given its adviceto Tony Benn and he had not replied to it and then he sent out amessage that he wished me to spend a day with Frances Morrell andFrancis Cripps and we should negotiate an agreed cabinet commit-tee paper. I went to the Permanent Secretary and said, ‘What guid-ance do you give me on this?’ and he said, ‘The Department hasalready given its advice and the minister has not yet responded to


that advice and you have no authority to draft a paper which mightconflict with our advice.’ I had a terrible day trying to draft a paperwithout having to give advice which would get me into trouble withthe Permanent Secretary… You are right; there is a constitutionalissue about who you serve.

These issues are reflected generally in the Whitehall culture.Nevertheless, there is no single, uniformly accepted, culture.

Competing cultural frameworks in Whitehall

There are distinct sub-cultures within departmental divisions andagencies and competing cultures and interpretations of cultures inWhitehall as a whole. As we will see in Chapter 4, the DTI for a longperiod had two very distinct cultures in Trade and Industry. It is alsoincreasingly apparent that agencies are developing particular cultureswhich separate them from their parent departments. Even within adepartment particular divisions may have a distinct and long-termculture. However, culture at this level is important because, whilst muchof the generic Whitehall culture is concerned with defining the ‘other’, itis at the departmental or division level that officials define themselves,defining what they do and how they should relate to the rest ofWhitehall. The overlaying of a departmental culture upon the broaderWhitehall culture can also create an underlying and ever-present tensionfor officials. The Whitehall culture prizes loyalty to ministers, whilst thedepartment culture usually prizes loyalty to the department, except inthe private office where loyalty to the minister vis-à-vis the department isthe overriding precept of action. Thus, the existence of these competingsub-cultures creates ambiguities that allow for subversions and conflicts.

What is constant in the clashing cultures is the adherence to thegeneral Whitehall culture at the elite levels and the process of insula-tion which it creates. Whitehall is insulated by two elements of theculture. One is the notion of the public service ethos, meaning thatdecision-making goes on within Whitehall without any directaccountability to, or interaction with, the public and this is rein-forced by the parliamentary state (Judge 1993) which means that it isministers not officials who are accountable and responsible for thepolicy process.

A further fracture in the culture of Whitehall is the distinctionbetween ministers and officials. Although, to some extent, officialsdefine the way ministers behave, ministers and officials conceive ofthemselves in very different ways; they operate according to distinct


rules. Furthermore, the basis of official power is knowledge and thebasis of ministerial power is authority. Officials are socialised to acceptministerial authority whilst ministers need official knowledge in termsof both the technical knowledge about the policy concerns of thedepartment and administrative knowledge about how to run thedepartment. This creates two problems: one is the imbalance ofresources, with officials having much more knowledge, time, informa-tion and know-how; and the second is the fact that ministerial author-ity is often delegated to officials, who make decisions with little or noreference to the minister.

The paradox of the imbalance of resources is resolved because theactors – ministers and officials – operate within a structured world intowhich each brings different resources and, in order to achieve goals,they need each other. The relationship is structured by: the institutionswithin which they operate (i.e. the departments, the mechanisms ofcabinet government and party); the different resources which theypossess, which again are institutional and constitutional; and their dif-ferent perceptions of each other and their respective roles. However,whilst it is a structured relationship, it is one to which both partiesbring their own resources and one which, because it is based on per-ceptions and a constitution, exists through the reproduction of rules,rather than on paper and which is continually open to re-interpreta-tion. Ministers and civil servants have different resources; they do notoccupy the same structural positions or face the same constraints; andtheir abilities to act and to achieve their goals vary. As one formerofficial said of the relationship: ‘It seems to me that the essence of it(the relationship) is dynamic interaction. It is not that there is one setof values, propositions, positions and needs that the politicians haveand another set that the official system has and there is some sort ofcompromise, rather they interact.’ Another official saw the relationshipworking well when it was one of ‘give and take’. Officials are restrainedby the culture that empowers them; they accept ministerial authorityin two senses: the minister is the author of action but under that coverand the cover of ministerial responsibility, they are delegates andimplementers, with all that implies, of ministerial authority (seeChapter 7).

The changing culture within Whitehall

As we have argued, culture is always being contested and the 1980ssaw a clear conflict between the traditional Whitehall culture of the


Figure 2.3 Competing cultural frameworks

Values Actions Institutions

Managerialism Efficiency Can-doer Flexible/and Effectiveness Policy fragmentedEconomy implementer

Traditional Integrity Policy adviser Hierarchical/andWhitehall Neutrality Fact imparter unifiedCulture Elitism

public service ethos and the new culture of managerialism. In termsof the senior Civil Service, the impact was a very explicit expectation,in the words of the current Cabinet Secretary: ‘that they had tobecome managers – a major cultural change’ (Wilson 1999: 7). Eachof these cultural frameworks presupposes distinct values, actions andinstitutions.

Within Whitehall, there are competing cultural frameworks (see Fig. 2.3). These are, of course, sets of socially constructed values whichprotect the interests of various actors. The public service ethos is aboutmaintaining a particular perception of the Civil Service which bothidentifies and hides the nature of their power. It identifies the power ofofficials because it places the determination of the public good in theirhands and it hides it by presuming their neutrality and the purity oftheir motives. Officials are working for the public good and, therefore,they have no interest in power for its own sake. At the same time, theethos identifies politicians as the decision-makers.

The public service ethos provides a framework for official influence.Through their integrity they can do the ‘objective analysis’ and advisethe minister on the best course of action. However, if they fail toinfluence the minister, the ethos also justifies and legitimises theirbehaviour because it is for the minister to decide and the official toimplement his or her wishes. In this sense, the public service ethosconstitutes the power of officials and defines the nature of the relation-ship with ministers.

The public service ethos operated smoothly in a particular, historical,context. It could work within the postwar era because of deference andconsensus. Deference meant that people were, on the whole, preparedto accept closed Whitehall policy-making without questioning policymakers and, indeed, with little debate. The consensus meant thatofficials had a relatively clear idea of what ministers from either party


wanted to achieve. Hence, they were permitted a relatively large degreeof autonomy in developing policy within that framework which wasseen as essentially one of pragmatism rather than ideology. A numberof officials reported how, in the 1950s, especially with fewer juniorministers, they were left very much to their own devices.

From the late 1960s, a number of factors changed this context and,to some extent, began to challenge the public service ethos. In the1960s and 1970s, government was seen to be failing. The elitistWhitehall machine was not regarded as providing either political oreconomic success. With political failure in Suez and increasing aware-ness of economic decline, respect for the ancien régime began to dimin-ish. In the 1960s, many of the old institutions in Britain werequestioned and the complacent continuation of the old ways wasthreatened. In the 1970s, it appeared that there was ‘overload’ and gov-ernment was unable to deliver the demands of its constituencies. Thisresulted in a loss of legitimacy and the decline of deference (Jessop1974; King 1975; Beer 1982). Ministers in a number of Labour govern-ments were less enamoured of their officials and they were concernedthat, through their autonomy, they were pursuing their own policies,rather than those of the government (see Crossman 1972a, 1972b;Benn 1980; Castle 1984). At the same time, a number of academic,journalistic and political works pointed to the failures of the officialmachinery (Balogh 1959; Sampson 1962; Hennessy 1989). In responseto these concerns, the Fulton Committee was established in 1966 toexamine the ‘structure, recruitment and management’ of the CivilService. The Fulton Report was critical of the amateurism of the CivilService and called for professionalisation and the imposition of greatermanagerialism. Although many of the Fulton recommendationsfloundered on Civil Service resistance, they did indicate a questioningof many of the traditional values. (For a full account see Hennessy1989; Kellner and Crowther Hunt 1980; and Fry 1993.)

Second, after 1979 Thatcherism presented a challenge to this consen-sus, particularly given its lack of faith in the public service. This was areaction to what the new government conceived as an elitist, ‘world-weary’ and defeatist view of politics festering away in the corridors ofWhitehall. It was encapsulated, in a now infamous statement attributedto William Armstrong, Head of the Civil Service between 1968 and1974, that the role of Whitehall was to ‘manage the decline of Britain inan orderly fashion’ (Richards 1997: 116). Thatcher thought that civilservants were too wedded to the consensus and that their role should beto serve ministers and not their perception of the public interest.


According to Fry (1995: 38): ‘The Higher Civil Service, like the careerCivil Service of which it was a part, was a natural adversary for theThatcher Government because of its guilt by association with theformer economic and social order.’ Thatcher did not value the publicservice ethos, because it was associated with big government and minis-ters being dominated by officials. Rather, as she reveals in her memoirs,she embraced private sector values:

I knew from my father’s accounts that the free market was like avast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals allover the world to meet the ever changing needs of peoples in differ-ent countries, from different classes, of different religions …Governments acted on a much smaller store of conscious informa-tion and, by contrast, were themselves ‘blind forces’ blunderingabout in the dark, and obstructing the operations of markets ratherthan improving them. (Thatcher 1993: 11)

Thatcher saw the Civil Service as wedded to consensus and as dominat-ing the actions of ministers (Fry 1995). She believed this would have aninsidious effect on the radical policies her government proposed. Also,according to Ian Gilmour (1997: 227): ‘Mrs Thatcher … had no greatadmiration for the public servant in general – much preferring busi-nessmen, sometimes rather dodgy ones – or for the civil servants inparticular, thinking if they had been any good they would have beenin the City making money.’ The solution was the introduction ofmarket values as a way to reassert ministers’ managerial control and toimprove the efficiency of the Civil Service. Crucially, she explicitlywanted to ‘de-privilege’ the Civil Service, so that it operated similarlyto the private sector.

For Thatcher, the public service ethos was a discursive construct whichprivileged officials. It also reflected a particular view of the state, stateinstitutions and certain forms of political economy; the Keynesian wel-farism which contain both strong statist and laissez-faire elements butessentially a strong element of elite control from Whitehall. The 1980ssaw tensions develop in relation to the ethos because of the decline ofdeference to the men in Whitehall which resulted from the problems ofoverload and government failure and the rise of an ideology whichfavoured the private sector over public service. This ideology was pro-pounded by a government committed to achieving its goals and so itwas not prepared to privilege the Civil Service. Therefore, the ideologyraised questions and provided the means to challenge the public service


ethos. The role of officials was not to be policy advisers, bound up in asymbiotic relationship with ministers, but to implement as effectivelyand efficiently as possible the policy preferences of ministers (seeCampbell and Wilson 1995; Foster and Plowden 1996). Consequently,the new culture was about officials as efficient managers, thus recon-structing the nature of their power and their relationships with minis-ters. The combination of failures in Whitehall, a new approach topolitical economy and the state and a distinctive ideology, resulted in anattempt to articulate a new construction of the civil servant and theWhitehall culture. The impact of this cultural change on departmentswill be examined in Chapter 4 and its impact on minister–civil servantrelations in Chapter 7.

The importance of culture

The Civil Service is an intensely culture-bound organisation. Culture islearned through the processes of recruitment, training and work andcontinually modified and reinforced through action. Culture is under-pinned by interrelated actions, values and organisations. Organisationshold cultures, they institutionalise sets of rule-bound behaviour whichexist beyond the individual. They do this by reaffirming sets of valuesthat govern behaviour, relationships and solutions to problems. Valuesunderpin action which, in turn, creates and recreates values and organ-isation. Civil servants are constituted through their culture and it isthis culture that defines and informs the exercise of power. It governsthe way officials behave and their relationships with ministers. It isthrough maintaining this relationship that Civil Service power is con-stituted. They are fact-givers, advisers, judges of the constitution andconstituters of the role of officials. Therefore, they do not conspire tohave power over ministers, but the nature of the relationship meansthat they have power over ministers through their interpretation of therules. At the same time, they are governed by rules of loyalty to minis-ters and the binding nature of ministerial authority and so power is nota zero-sum game; it is present in every aspect of the culture. However,competing cultural concepts construct different power relationships.From 1979 onwards, the Conservative government challenged thepublic service ethos through the notion of new public management,undermining the core of Whitehall culture. In addition, it introducedcrucial organisational changes through the creation of agencies and thestrategic management review which changed the organisational basis


of the Whitehall culture. Finally, through a number of programmaticchanges, the Thatcher government assaulted the particular cultures ofdepartment. It is one of the aims of this book to assess the impact ofthese factors on the culture of Whitehall departments. This returns usto perhaps the key problem of cultural accounts. As DiMaggio andPowell (1991: 30) argue: ‘If institutions exert such a powerful influenceover the ways in which people can formulate their desires and work toattain them, then how does institutional change occur?’

43

3Structural Change in CentralGovernment

The last chapter highlighted the Conservatives’ conscious attempt tochange the culture within Whitehall. In this chapter, we analyse insti-tutional/structural change in central government during the sameperiod. There are many narrative accounts detailing the changes(Hennessy 1989; Plowden 1994; Campbell and Wilson 1995; Fry 1995)and we shall not rehearse these accounts. Unfortunately, however, mostof these accounts are descriptive rather than explanatory. In contrast,rational choice theorists (see Dunleavy 1991; Dowding 1995) haveattempted to explain these changes, but only by offering an agency-centred account. Our aim here is to provide a fuller and more compre-hensive analysis which acknowledges both the structural constraintsupon change and the role of individuals in bringing change about.

More specifically, in our view there are four sets of structural factors– political, economic, ideological and organisational – which have acrucial impact upon reform in central government. Certainly, wewould question any unidimensional explanation of change. At thesame time, we must also acknowledge that agency, as well as structural,factors have shaped the process of change.

In order to help explain the organisational changes in Britishcentral government in the 1980s and 1990s, this chapter is dividedinto three sections. The first section argues that in 1979 theConservatives did not have a ‘grand strategy’ (see Fry 1984), nor a‘general game plan’ (see Dowding 1995), for reforming the machineryof government. There was not (see Greer 1994; Rhodes 1997) a ‘revo-lutionary evolution’ but a process of incremental reforms, developedin situ, which led to a process of ‘evolutionary transformation’.Consequently, in the second section, we question the notion that thegovernment developed a coherent New Public Management (NPM)


programme. We are not arguing that after 18 years the Civil Serviceremained broadly unchanged. Undoubtedly, the state in 1997 wasvastly different to the one in 1979, but this ‘transformation’ wasachieved more by a process of trial and error in which a series of,often (ideologically) conflicting, piecemeal reforms were cobbledtogether. However, talk of NPM is misleading because it suggests thatthere was a blueprint for reform where none existed. Our finalsection argues that the transformation which occurred during thisperiod fundamentally altered the power-dependency relationshipbetween ministers and civil servants (see Rhodes 1981; Smith 1999a).In 1979, it was generally perceived that the power of the civil ser-vants vis-à-vis ministers had increased. Many suggested that there wasa need for parliamentary sovereignty, or more precisely executivesovereignty, to be reasserted. By 1997, the Conservatives hadachieved this goal, but not to the extent of destroying the ‘Whitehallparadigm’ (see Campbell and Wilson 1995; Foster and Plowden1996). We would therefore contend that the issue of power has beenone of the key dynamics which underpinned the last 18 years ofreform, but which has been often understated in accounts of thisperiod. Clearly, this third point indicates that we perceive politicalfactors to be the key determinant of recent changes in central govern-ment. However, we do not wish to discount the role of economic, ideo-logical or organisational explanations which also played a role ininforming the last Conservative governments’ approach to reform.Finally, we assess the degree to which structural and institutional changehas created or helped to create a ‘differentiated polity’. In subsequentchapters we examine the impact of these changes on departments.

A grand strategy before 1979?

When the Conservatives were elected in 1979, they had no ‘grandstrategy’ (Fry 1984) to reform the state (see Dowding 1995). Indeed, theConservatives took far less interest in the machinery of governmentwhen they were in opposition between 1974 and 1979 than they hadunder Heath between 1966 and 1970, when they produced a series ofreform proposals. Consequently, soon after it was elected, the Heathgovernment introduced a White Paper, The Reorganisation of CentralGovernment. David Howell (1970), the author of A New Style ofGovernment which provided much of the intellectual backdrop for theWhite Paper, explained to us that:

Structural Change in Central Government 45

There is a view that the change in culture happened nine yearsearlier than 1979, with the Heath government talking about a newstyle of government. In those days we thought about hiving-off andquangos, as well as unravelling departments. The Civil Service firstof all fought a rear-guard action against that and then began toembrace it and, to some extent, I think that carried on under theLabour government. So, when we were re-elected in 1979, some cul-tural change had occurred already.

The key aim of the 1970 White Paper was to change the structure ofgovernment, by merging a number of small departments into larger,federal departments, which would mean a smaller number of Cabinetministers. Through the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) andProgramme Analysis and Review (PAR), the hope was that theCabinet could develop a broader, strategic overview of the govern-ment’s programme.

After the Heath government’s electoral defeats in 1974, followed bythe installation of Margaret Thatcher as party leader in 1975,Conservative attitudes to the state, and more particularly the party’sattitude to the Civil Service, were re-examined. The new‘Thatcherites’ argued that the state institutions, including the CivilService, enshrined a deeply entrenched, corporatist settlement andthe state was now overloaded (Brittan 1975, 1979; King 1975; Jay1977; Adonis and Hames 1994; Gamble 1994; Cockett 1995; Hay1996; Kavanagh 1997). They were also influenced by public-choiceanalyses of bureaucratic behaviour, which saw the public sector as‘flabby’; a result of public servants not being exposed to the rigours ofthe market. This, it was argued, led to over-spending, over-manningand inefficiency. These accounts portrayed public sector officials asbudget maximisers who acted in their own self-interest, rather thanin the interest of the government, or, more broadly, the public’sinterest (see Niskanen 1971, 1978; Breton and Wintrobe 1974; Migueand Berlanger 1974; Noll and Fiorina 1979).

The idea of government overload coupled with public choiceaccounts of bureaucratic behaviour provided a political discourseabout the role of the state which the Thatcherites embraced. Forexample, as Campbell and Wilson (1995: 304) observed: ‘Thatcherherself brandished Niskanen’s work on bureaucracy at her colleaguesand pressed them to read it.’ So, it is important not to discount therole of ideas and discourse. This evolving New Right discourse foundfavour with a number of Conservative Shadow ministers, notably


Keith Joseph, David Howell, John Nott and, more latterly, MargaretThatcher.

Finally, there was an evolving critique, voiced as much by those onthe radical left of the political spectrum as by the emerging New Right,that the Civil Service was over-powerful and too wedded to a postwarsettlement and the postwar consensus. The New Right asserted thatany government with a radical agenda which wished to break freewould be hampered by the Civil Service’s commitment to this con-sensus. They argued that the way in which senior mandarins hadconstrained the Fulton Committee’s remit and subsequently systemat-ically emasculated its report provided ample evidence of the CivilService’s resistance to change (see Kellner and Crowther Hunt 1980;Richards 1997).

In this context, it is not surprising that a number of authors suggestthat to understand subsequent change we need to focus upon the roleof the emerging neo-liberal wing of the Conservative Party. This expla-nation focuses upon the role of ideology and upon intentional expla-nation. However, it fails to recognise the structural context withinwhich the New Right discourse was evolving. In particular, the compo-sition of the Conservative Party in the late 1970s and the political pri-orities of the newly elected Conservative government acted as powerfulstructural constraints on the growth of this political discourse in theConservative Cabinet. New Right ideology didn’t dominate theConservative Party in the late 1970s; neither was Mrs Thatcher’s posi-tion as leader unchallenged.

The Parliamentary Conservative Party has always been a broadchurch (see Gamble 1994; Ludlam and Smith 1996; Hay 1996;Kavanagh 1997; Gilmour 1997; Heath 1998). Certainly, underThatcher, the Opposition front bench contained an array of individu-als with differing political views and between 1975 and 1979 the ‘neo-liberal’ wing of the party was not dominant. As such, it is unsurprisingthat the Shadow Cabinet had an ambivalent attitude towards the CivilService. Progressive or one-nation Conservatism regarded the CivilService as one of the great institutions underpinning the status quothat the Party should acknowledge and protect. Lord Carrington ar-ticulated this view in an interview:

I think the top of the Civil Service is very good. I think their proce-dures were very good, as were the people who worked for me. Imean the people I had working with me could not have been bet-tered anywhere. It’s also a great mistake to think that what the civil


servants want to do is not necessarily what you want to do. I’m notquite sure why people say: ‘He’s a prisoner of his department’. Ihappen to think that most of what the Foreign Office advised me todo was absolutely right, but I was not a prisoner of the ForeignOffice. I happened to agree with the policy and I found themextremely loyal. I think that if you do have a relationship with themthen you are more likely to get your way.

Clearly, this view was at odds with the view of those on the ‘dry’ wingwho demanded some form of radical political reform. As we saw in thelast chapter, they argued that the elite in Whitehall were too closelyassociated with consensus politics and were therefore partly responsiblefor Britain’s relative economic decline. As Thatcher (1993: 48) retro-spectively observed about the attitudes of her senior mandarins in1979: ‘What lay still further behind this … was a desire for no change… The idea that the Civil Service could be insulated from a reformingzeal that would transform Britain’s public and private institutions overthe next decade was a pipe-dream.’

In part then, the delay in the reform of central government was theresult of the division within the government on the Civil Service.However, more importantly, the effects of rising inflation andincreasing unemployment, and a desire to curtail the perceivedpower of the trade unions, meant that economic policy, not centralgovernment reform, dominated the political agenda. Whereas Heathhad regarded reorganising the machinery of state as at the core of hisgovernment’s broader policy objectives, in contrast, Civil Servicereform was not a pivotal concern for the Thatcher governmentduring its first term. Indeed, the government’s attention was increas-ingly concentrated on the economy as Britain slumped into recessionby 1981.

By 1979 then, one wing of the Cabinet stressed the need for publicsector reform and, in particular, change in the Civil Service. However,at that stage, the neo-liberals did not have a coherent radical packageof structural change. In addition, because of the ideological tensionswithin the Thatcher Shadow Cabinet, coupled with the need to prior-itise economic policy, there was no cohesively thought-out, strategic,blueprint or ‘grand strategy’ for Civil Service reform. Neither was therean ideologically informed ‘general game plan’, as some public choicetheorists suggest. In fact, it was not until 1983 that any strategy at allemerged, provided by what became known in Whitehall folklore as theHoskyns’ critique (see Hoskyns 1983).


A grand strategy in power: towards a new publicmanagement?

The Conservatives learnt a number of strategic political lessons on how toapproach the Civil Service from the experiences of the 1970s. In particu-lar, there was a widespread belief that the emasculation of the FultonReport reflected a growth of Civil Service power in Whitehall. The fate ofthe Fulton Report has been comprehensively covered elsewhere (seePonting 1986; Hennessy 1989; Drewry and Butcher 1991; Pyper 1991;Plowden 1994; Theakston 1995; and Richards 1997). Essentially, theReport was never effectively backed by the Wilson Cabinet and, as such, itwas open to manipulation by Whitehall insiders. However, a decade later,the Fulton Report proved important to the Thatcher government, whoused it to argue that there was an imbalance in Whitehall between policy-makers and effective managers of the machine.

This theme resonated throughout the reforms of the 1980s. TheFulton Report, and Whitehall’s de-radicalisation of it, taught theThatcher administration three important political lessons: senior civilservants could be a powerful reactionary force when confronted withradical reform; it was crucial to have the right personnel in key posi-tions in order to ensure support for reform; and it was essential to givestrong political backing if any reform of the institutions and practicesof Whitehall was to be effective. Indeed, this last point was affirmed bythe Conservatives’ experiences in government between 1970 and 1974.From the outset, the Heath government had a coherent strategy fortransforming the machinery of government which the Thatcher gov-ernment lacked. Yet, Heath’s reforms floundered because he and hisgovernment lost interest; Thatcher did not.

Re-inventing public administration in the Thatcher era?

In recent years, much has been written on the eclipse of public admin-istration. It is argued that it has been supplanted by a post-modern ‘newmanagerialism’ paradigm (see Clegg 1990; Hood 1991; Rhodes 1997;Weller et al. 1997; Parsons 1998). Is there evidence of such a change inBritain? We are more sceptical than some. In part this is because webelieve this assessment is based upon a misreading of the past.

As we saw, managerialism was a theme which affected public adminis-tration in both the 1960s and 1970s. So, in determining the true nature ofpublic administration under the Conservatives, it is important toacknowledge that the period after 1979 was marked by both continuityand change. As such, our argument has three key elements:


• The Conservatives pursued a course of reform that altered bothpublic administration and concomitantly the structure of the state.

• Their reform programme was broadly ad hoc. It was based on a seriesof distinct measures which, retrospectively, can be portrayed as con-tributing to a process of evolutionary reform.

• Their programme lacked a blueprint and, as such, had contradictoryelements. In particular, they remained committed to key features ofthe constitution. This continued commitment leaves open the ques-tion of whether there was a paradigmatic shift from public adminis-tration to new managerialism

Although the structural framework of the state was to a degree recastduring the Conservative administrations, its fundamental nature was pre-served by the maintenance of the existing constitutional status quo. Assuch, we question the view that there has been a move to ‘new manageri-alism’ accompanied by a ‘hollowing-out’ of the state. Instead, we contendthat the state has always been a complex, amorphous and changingentity so that, although it was re-constituted under the Conservatives,this was not unique nor did it amount to a transformation. In addition,both ministers and civil servants have generally remained committed tothe Westminster model of British government based upon a closed, elitistand secretive system (see Smith 1999a; Richards and Smith 2000).Overall, the Thatcher government’s reform agenda remained structurallyconstrained by its commitment to most elements of the Westminstermodel. This commitment mitigated against the formation of an alterna-tive, coherent, radical reform package for Whitehall.

Continuity and change under the Conservatives: re-assessing newpublic management

Regardless of how we define NPM, our interviews indicate that theprocess of Civil Service reform was not based on a clearly constructedblueprint of reform, or even a loosely assembled range of goals (seeHogwood 1997; Ling 1998: 118). So, for example, Peter Kemp, one ofthe key figures involved in the Next Steps process, maintains that theConservative administration:

… had a vague feeling that there was something wrong with theCivil Service machinery of over half million people … I think it isfair to say with all the reforms (and I accept there are some politicalovertures to some of them) there was a natural evolution … It wassimply a case of tapping ahead with a white stick. Some of us felt,


and Margaret Thatcher was included in our number from the pointof view of the management and administration of the Civil Serviceand John Major from the point of view of customer service, thatsomething was not quite right. It was a political feel at the top end,while it was official drive at the lower end.

Similarly, another retired senior official observed:

Some of the things that were being proposed were very vague andone or two things were accepted maybe two or three years later,while other proposals simply faded away. There was no real sub-stance to the reforms up until the Next Steps.

As such, the process of reform is much more properly understood as aresponse to a combination of political, economic, ideological andorganisational factors. The reforms were based upon a normative viewthat the private sector was dynamic and efficient, while the publicsector was stagnant, reactionary and wasteful. They reflected a processof strategic learning by a Conservative administration that was in officefor a long time. This learning was a response to lessons learnt from theprevious decade and based upon an ill-defined, and often unpre-dictable, process of trial and error when in power (see Hogwood 1997:715). Nevertheless, whilst there was some pressure from the centre forchange, the implementation process was very much in the hands ofdepartmental ministers. This produced contradictions and delays inthe reforms. Indeed, an official argued:

We did actually produce systems and methodology for doing all this‘MINIS’ stuff for our ministers and I’m afraid I had to say theyweren’t interested. Fowler hadn’t the least interest in this sort ofthing because it wasn’t political. I mean what was the good oftelling him precisely how every penny in the Department was beingspent when what he wanted to do was get some political changes. Iremember a presentation we gave to ministers about this when wegot the first round of this process set up and Hugh Rossi, he was ajunior minister then, said in rather supercilious way: ‘Of course thisis just Yes Minister stuff, isn’t it?’ And we were absolutely bloodyfurious. I mean we really could have taken him outside and duffedhim up because we were trying to provide what Mrs Thatcherwanted and they weren’t interested …


As such, the use of NPM as a framework for analysing change in Britishcentral government is problematic. In particular, it often leads analyststo portray the reform as part of a coherent, neo-liberal agenda thatswept through Britain and other similar liberal-democratic states, suchas New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Holland, France, Canada and theUnited States. As we have seen, the reform process was initiated wellbefore Thatcher with Heath and Fulton and was given further impetusby the IMF’s demands for cuts in Civil Service numbers (see Chapter 4).

The NPM thesis suggests that the state changed from being stable,unilinear, consensual, centralised, rule-bound and paternalistic tobeing responsive, flexible, dynamic, outcome-orientated, decentralisedand enabling. This clearly oversimplifies the process of change. In par-ticular, it is crucial to disaggregate. So, for example, as we show inChapter 4, a department like the Home Office remained rule-bound,hierarchical and centralised, while the Next Step Agencies connected tothe DSS were much more flexible, decentralised and enabling.

Re-interpreting change in British central government in the1980s and 1990s: a power dependency perspective

If NPM does not provide a suitable framework of analysis for under-standing the process of reform, then how should the events of the lasteighteen years be properly explained? Our interviews suggest that oneof the key dynamics was political; the Conservatives were concernedthat civil servants had become too powerful, at the expense of minis-ters. Executive sovereignty needed to be reasserted and this requiredchange in both the culture and operational practices of Whitehall. TheConservatives argued that the Civil Service should no longer beregarded as a ‘special case’ enjoying a whole range of privileges accu-mulated over two centuries. Instead, it should revert to its original role,as, in Northcote-Trevelyan’s terms, courtiers to their political masters.For the Conservatives, the raison d’être of Whitehall was to serve theduly elected government of the day, rather than attempting to imposeits own consensual views on the political process. In order to under-stand the reform in Whitehall, it is crucial to recognise theConservatives’ desire to reassert the power of the executive in pursuitof an image of strong government and of governing competence(Bulpitt 1986). Here, we do not wish to discount the role of ideology,or more specifically of new business models of management in thereform process, but instead to suggest that political factors are oftengiven insufficient attention.


After eighteen years of reforming central government, theConservatives were successful in reasserting executive authority, butthis shift in the power balance between ministers and civil servantsneeds to be situated within the context of a model of power-depen-dency (see Rhodes 1981; Smith 1999a). We would question theaccounts of authors such as Foster and Plowden (1996) who suggestthat the Whitehall paradigm has been eclipsed by a post-Whitehall,minister-dominated, paradigm. Foster and Plowden (1996: 244–5; seealso Campbell and Wilson 1995: 294–301) contend:

Not since the seventeenth century has any one element in the con-stitution arrogated as much power to itself as ministers haverecently … Future politics could be much more overtly ‘political’ inthe absence of both effective parliamentary scrutiny and the tradi-tional restraining influence of the Civil Service.

Such accounts which portray the change in power relations betweenministers and civil servants as a zero-sum game and which suggestthat, by the mid-1990s, ministers dominated the policy process, fail tounderstand the fluid nature of power within the core executive. Thereare tensions within the core executive between the authority of minis-ters, which results from the royal prerogative, parliamentary sover-eignty and their control of departments, and the crucial role ascribedto officials, which reflects the Haldane model of a relationship andrecognises their role as custodians of the rule book and their control ofthe administrative machinery. In the rest of this chapter, we outlinethe structural and organisational reforms within the Civil Servicewhich occurred under the Conservatives, in order to demonstrate that,although ministers were successful in increasing their power in relationto civil servants, it remained an exchange relationship. Moreover, inour view, the role of particular officials reflected the views and actionsof individual ministers, as much as the structural reforms.

Re-asserting executive sovereignty: reform of Whitehallunder the Conservatives

The Conservatives adopted a pragmatic approach to reform whichcentred on restructuring the balance between the public and privatesector, while leaving the constitution untouched. They adopted a dualstrategy; reorganising the state, while undertaking an ad hoc programmeof de-privileging and reforming the Civil Service. To an extent, the


main aims were political, to re-establish executive control over thebureaucracy, while at the same time reducing the role of the state.

Reorganising the state

Under the Conservatives, the boundaries of the state visibly shifted.However, there are different interpretations of these changes. So, as wesaw in the introductory chapter, some authors argue that the state washollowed out. In contrast, others see the state as having undergone aprocess of reconstitution, in which the power and the size of the stateremain, but in a more diffuse, decentralised, form (see Saward 1997;Smith 1999a; Marsh, Richards and Smith 2001).

However one interprets the re-drawing of the state boundaries underthe Conservatives, it is clear that it produced contradictory outcomes.Such changes, when coupled with the organisational and personnelchanges the Conservatives introduced, made the lines of accountabilitymore fissiparous, increased the complexity of the policy process andthreatened collective decision-making (see Chapter 7 and Flinders2000). On the other hand, the changes allowed ministers to assertgreater control over what remained at the core, i.e. the senior CivilService involved in policy-making.

Re-imposing authority over the core

In order to analyse the Conservatives’ strategy for re-imposing execu-tive authority over what they perceived as an overly powerful bureau-cracy, two key areas need to be examined: personnel reform andmanagerial reform.

Personnel reform

The Conservatives’ initial approach to the personnel reform ofWhitehall was primarily political; it was a programme based on de-privileging the Civil Service. As one retired senior official argued: ‘Itsoon became obvious after 1979 that the Civil Service was no longer to be regarded as a “special case” and we were about to come under attack. Something unusual from a post-war ConservativeGovernment.’ Thus, there followed a period in which the Civil ServiceDepartment was abolished (1981), there was a move towards a de-cen-tralised pay system following the Megaw Committee’s recommenda-tions (1982) and the CPRS was abolished (1983).

The Thatcher government’s strategy to realign the power balancebetween the executive and Whitehall also embraced changing theculture and attitude of most senior civil servants. As has been shown


elsewhere (Richards 1997), the Thatcher government did not attemptto politicise the senior Civil Service by appointing a series ofConservative Party sympathisers to the most senior posts in Whitehall.However, given the longevity of Margaret Thatcher’s time as PrimeMinister, she had responsibility for approving a large number ofappointments to the top two grades in Whitehall. In so doing, she per-sonalised the appointments system, ensuring that individuals whowere ‘managerially-orientated, can-doers’ were appointed to a numberof strategic posts (Richards 1997). This had an effect on the culture atthe highest tiers in Whitehall, which Thatcher hoped would permeatedownwards throughout the rest of the senior Civil Service. Seniorofficials began to concentrate more on finding ways to implement gov-ernment policies, rather than adopting the more traditional, ‘snag-hunter’ role of previous Whitehall generations.

The vast majority of the senior officials we interviewed, both retiredand still serving, accepted that a transformation in their role occurredduring the 1980s. So, as one contemporary official commented:

I think what happened during the 1980s is that the Civil Servicemoved to recognising their job as delivering what ministers wanted.Can-do man was in and wait-a-minute man was out. Ministers notonly knew what they wanted, but often how to get there. The CivilService role as ballast was sidelined. There was no room for it. Soofficials buckled down and really got on with it.

Similarly, a retired Permanent Secretary emphasised:

I think Conservative ministers tended increasingly to want some-body to run the machine and do it effectively, but not to offer inde-pendent advice. That was the biggest change and I think this hashad an effect to this day on the calibre of the people coming intothe Civil Service.

In personnel terms, one of the key changes during the Thatcher periodinvolved an increased emphasis upon the need to appoint efficientmanagers of the policy and implementation process, rather than policyadvisers (see Chapter 7). Here, the process of reform should be under-stood as political, involving the reassertion of ministerial power overthe Civil Service. However, at a secondary level, it is also organisationaland economic, emphasising the need for senior civil servants to beefficient managers of the machine.


In the Major years, a whole series of personnel reforms were intro-duced: the Efficiency Unit’s Career Management and SuccessionPlanning (1993); a White Paper, Continuity and Change (1994); asecond White Paper, The Civil Service: Taking Forward Continuity andChange (1995); and the Senior Management Review (SMR). Gradually,but in the view of many people far too slowly, the system was chang-ing from one in which individuals gained entry into a career to one inwhich the individual was appointed to a specific job. This was reflectedin the two central aims of the White Papers: to break down the hierar-chy in the upper echelons of the senior Civil Service and so increasedelegation and diversity of advice within the policy process; and,where possible, to eliminate layers of management among the 3000top civil servants in Whitehall.

It was the 1995 Senior Management Review that had the most pro-nounced effect on the policy-making process. It led to the creation ofthe Senior Civil Service, the removal of a whole bureaucratic tier(Grade 3) and the devolution of responsibility down the Whitehallhierarchy. However, here it should be noted that there were political,economic and organisational factors underpinning this change. At themost formal level, the SMR was an organisational reform. Its rationalewas to move closer to European models of bureaucratic organisation;so, for example, Deputy Secretaries (Grade 2) were to adopt the EU titleof Director-Generals. As such, the aim was to break down the tradi-tional hierarchical (gradist) nature of policy-making in Whitehall, soofficials would now be known by their job titles instead of their grade.At the same time, the SMR was underpinned by a Treasury initiativeaimed at reducing Whitehall departments to an elite core of policy-makers, with other activities being further contracted out either toagencies or the private sector. In this sense, the reforms were justifiedin economic and political terms. They would result in cost savings andgive ministers greater control over the rump of the bureaucraticmachine left at the heart of Whitehall.

Managerial reform

During the 1980s, the Conservatives undertook a series of managerialreforms. Underpinning these reforms was a belief that officials allottedtoo much time to policy-making to the detriment of efficient manage-ment (see Adonis and Hames 1994). The key reforms were: Raynerism;the Financial Management Initiative; and, most importantly, the intro-duction of the Next Steps reforms in 1988. The latter established arange of agencies, with accountable chief executives, providing a


service along similar lines to a business operating in the private sector.Next Steps was not a radical departure from earlier attempts at reform,rather it was a reaction to, and consolidation of, previous ad hocattempts at change. Indeed, the incremental manner in which theConservatives arrived at Next Steps is symbolic of the whole process ofevolutionary transformation during the 1980s.

Subsequently, during the 1990s, the Major government surprisedmany by not only picking up the mantle of Civil Service reformsbequeathed by the Thatcher government, but also dramatically increas-ing the pace of reform. Between 1990 and 1997, there was a prolifera-tion of Next Steps Agencies, increased contracting-out (privatisation) ofgovernment business and the introduction of the Citizen’s Charter.Cumulatively, these all eroded the Northcote–Trevelyan notion thatthe Civil Service should be a career-oriented, unified and centralisedorganisation. The introduction of market forces to the structural andoperational framework of the Civil Service in the 1990s, created acogent logic for the extension of these principles to the managementof personnel at the core of Whitehall (see above).

However, it could be argued that it was the Next Steps programmethat was at the core of the most dynamic phase of the Conservatives’Whitehall reform. Although superficially Next Steps can be regarded asa reform programme based on an organisationally informed agenda,the rationale underpinning the initiative was political. TheConservatives believed that hiving-off departmental administrativefunctions would leave ministers with a smaller, policy-making elitebased in Whitehall, whose role would be to assist the government inits broader, strategic goals. As such, it would make it much easier forministers to make policy. In our account, the reform process wasdriven by the politicians, in order to restore executive authority, while,at the same time, establishing a more efficient model of the way inwhich to conduct government business (this argument is developedbelow, see Chapter 7).

Despite internal opposition, Next Steps eventually overcame theresidual barriers erected in Whitehall. Initially, the Treasury was verymuch opposed to the agencification process, while, more broadly,other departments were apathetic, in large part because they failed toappreciate the radical nature of Next Steps. Public-choice accounts ofNext Steps suggest that the resistance by the Treasury was due to itsunwillingness to cede power and control over departmental budgets(see Dowding 1995). However, it is clear from our interviews, thatsuch accounts fail to understand the political context in which the


reforms were introduced. As one senior official at the centre of reformnoted:

The Treasury was hotly and very aggressively opposed to it purelyon principle for a long time. Robert Armstrong, the then CabinetSecretary, was fairly pro-Next Steps, but he was a lame duck as hisretirement was fast approaching ... By mid-summer 1987, it was wellknown round Whitehall circles that Butler would be his succes-sor ... Armstrong came up with the idea that 12 units should beidentified for possible agency status. There then followed a severeargument led by Peter Middleton at the Treasury against Butler andArmstrong. The reason for this was the needle between Armstrongand Middleton, as Middleton would have dearly liked to have beenthe next Cabinet Secretary. Middleton is not a man to take hostages,so anything Butler liked he was going to kill. Thus, Middleton, asHead of the Treasury, came out against Next Steps.

In the face of such opposition, a compromise had to be reached andthis was achieved by allowing the Treasury a vestige of control in thereform process. As another official noted:

The whole thing was very petty, but a deal was done and a so-calledconcordat was worked out between the Treasury and what was thenthe OMCS under which the Treasury was to retain quite a lot ofpower. On the basis of that deal, Middleton did not withdraw hishostility, but he could no longer force Lawson to oppose it so much.So, it went back to Cabinet in early 1988 and it was duly launchedin February 1988.

The cumulative effect that this, and the ensuing reform programme,had on the functioning of government departments and their relationswith the Prime Minister, interest groups, agencies and Europe will bediscussed in subsequent chapters. However, it is important to empha-sise here that these reforms directly impacted on the relationshipbetween the executive and the bureaucracy. So, for example, a retiredCivil Service Commissioner concluded:

If you are looking at the structure of the senior Civil Service, I don’tthink you can ignore the introduction of Agencies. They have verymuch affected the nature of the senior people advising ministers. Iwould say that it is one of the most significant changes to the Civil


Service, since perhaps the Northcote–Trevelyan reforms. It seemsunfortunate to me that it has been done without Parliamentary leg-islation. But if you are talking about the type of people nowinvolved at the highest levels in the agencies, I think you will find agreat deal of them come from the private sector. So you have gotthis infusion of people from outside. The reforms have producedtangible effects both for the Civil Service and the functioning ofBritish government as a whole.

The above analysis was consistently substantiated by interviews withcivil servants. Indeed, the broad, consensual view was provided by one,recently retired, Permanent Secretary:

So much has now gone out to Executive Agencies and they havelargely an executive job to do. We have lost those days when youhad the key policy makers also running the big executive functions,within a large department. That opens some new questions aboutthe role of the Permanent Secretaries and higher civil servants inwhat is left of the policy-making departments, as distinct from theExecutive Agencies.

At the same time, it raises further questions about the degree to whichthe existing Civil Service Code has come under attack (see Richardsand Smith 2000). As a contemporary senior official put it:

I think the current reforms are extremely worrying. I think there isa danger of destroying the existing code and with it the Civil Serviceethos. You are going to have separate departments, you are going tohave people with an alien culture, which raises questions ofaccountability and also, I think, standards.

However, it is clear that reform in the late 1980s and 1990s produced asea-change in the structure, culture and operating procedures ofWhitehall. While Fulton was defused by the dynamic conservatism ofthe Civil Service, the reforms from Next Steps onwards have altered thebalance of power between ministers and civil servants. As Metcalfe(1993: 352) concludes:

Management methods, concepts, models, and values have beenaccepted as an integral part of the way the business of governmentis conducted. Whether they are the right management concepts is


open to debate, but then acceptance goes much deeper than almostanyone thought possible in 1979. It is difficult to imagine thesereforms being reversed. … Without suggesting that a total transfor-mation has occurred or that the changes have been completely suc-cessful. It is increasingly clear that a fundamental shift has beenmade which will have a permanent influence on the functioning ofBritish government.

Nevertheless, whilst the role of senior civil servants was to be moremanagerial and departments were to become less hierarchical, much ofthe role as defined by the Whitehall culture remained. They continuedas the key policy advisers, they were still loyal and they continued tocontrol the administrative machinery. They also continued the impor-tant ‘political’ role; civil servants know how to play both the Whitehalland Westminster games and thus retain a monopoly of advice to minis-ters on how they should defend themselves in Parliament, in Whitehallturf wars and in the spending round. Consequently, ministers’ depen-dence is high and so much of the traditional role is retained (seeChapter 7). Moreover, whilst a few ministers have been less willing totrust their officials (see the next chapter) the majority in the lastConservative administration retained traditional ‘Westminster model’perceptions of the roles of officials.

The changing organisational structure in our four departments

An analysis of reform in central government would be incompletewithout also considering the reorganisation of Whitehall departments.In the following section, we will look at change in each of our depart-ments between 1964 and 1999. The organisational history of each ofour departments is unique and, in many ways, this reflects the natureof the policy areas with which they deal. The Home Office has had themost stable organisational history, having, until very recently, neverundergone any fundamental reorganisation. On the other hand, theDepartment of Trade and Industry has experienced the greatest organ-isational dislocation involving a series of splits and mergers in the lastthirty years. The Department of Social Security has not endured thesame degree of organisational trauma as the DTI, but it too underwenta fundamental reorganisation when it was split from Health in 1988.Finally, the Department of Energy’s lifespan was closely linked to rapidchanges in the energy policy area. The Department was set up in 1974


in response to the energy crisis. It existed for less than two decades andits demise reflected the Conservatives’ view that Britain’s energy policyshould be determined by market forces with the state playing a limitedrole. As such, even a cursory examination indicates that each of ourdepartments has its own unique history.

The Department of Trade and Industry

Of the four departments we examined, the DTI has had by far the mostturbulent history of organisational reform. It is a department with acomplex history and a wide range of functions. At present, the DTI hasresponsibility for activities which include trade, competition policy,company regulation, the implementation of the single market andenergy. Despite the difficulty involved in restructuring departments,the DTI has been subject to many changes. In its modern guise the DTIwas created in 1970 in the drive for super-departments followingHeath’s White Paper on the Reorganisation of Central Government(see Cmnd 4506 1970; Radcliffe 1991). It was broken up in a 24-hourperiod in 1974 (Part 1990: 168).

The split took place in March 1974, following the February GeneralElection when three new departments were created: the Department ofTrade; the Department of Industry; and the Department of Prices andConsumer Protection. The observations of both the ministers and civilservants involved in that split indicate that there were two politicaldynamics involved. Firstly, Harold Wilson wished to create a CabinetPortfolio for Shirley Williams, a close ally whom he wanted as part ofhis ministerial team. Under the existing arrangements he had inher-ited, Wilson could not find a suitable position for Williams and so hecreated the Department of Price and Consumer Protection. The cre-ation of this department also fitted in with Labour manifesto commit-ments. As one senior official commented:

What drove the split between Industry, Trade and Prices? I suspect itwas one of those things that Labour ministers have always beenmore interested in that sort of area of government and given thatWilson had to find a certain number of holes for people, he found itconvenient to have three separate departments … In particular, tocreate a portfolio for Shirley Williams.

However, splitting the DTI was also a response to another more impor-tant political imperative. Harold Wilson did not want to have Tony


Benn in charge of such a powerful Whitehall department. By 1974,Benn had become a talisman for many on the left of the Labour Partyand Wilson was keen to see his growing parliamentary power base con-strained by the exigencies of ministerial office. With his experience inMinTech during the 1960s and his enthusiasm for large, technicallyinnovative, science-based programmes, Benn’s talents clearly suited adepartment whose responsibility lay in the industrial field. Yet, allow-ing Benn to take on responsibility for both Trade and Industry wouldprovide him with a power base in Cabinet which was unacceptable toWilson. By splitting up the department, he not only created moreCabinet portfolios for his own allies, but, more importantly, circum-scribed the position of Benn within the government.

As one former senior official in the Cabinet office, who was in theDTI at the time of the split, commented: ‘There was a desire by Wilsonto split the power base of Tony Benn, as, by that stage, Benn wasalready perceived to be a growing problem.’ Similarly, another retiredofficial, who at the time held a very senior post in the DTI, commented:

The split occurred quite simply because Wilson was not prepared tohand the whole thing over to Benn … The thing then was that TonyBenn was a real maverick in the side of the Wilson government.Wilson had put counterpoises into the Department, in the sensethat the Ministers of State below Benn were to the right of theDepartment, but that was not really strong enough. Benn hadbrought in one or two personal advisers and he worked in theDepartment very much against his colleagues and against HaroldWilson. Having seen this was likely, but having for Party politicalreasons had to give him [Benn] the senior post, corralled him anddid not give the whole of the Department.

The official then went on to note that the political imperative of ensuring that Benn’s power base was constrained, superseded the organisational logic of keeping certain functions in the department:

There is one very interesting example; the Department before hadbeen responsible for the printing and publishing industry and it wasquite natural that it should stay within the Department of Industry,but Harold said ‘In no way am I going to let Tony Benn have thatparticular industry under his wing.’ So, we will put it in Trade,although it doesn’t really belong there.


Wilson’s antipathy to Benn was also clear when he moved him fromIndustry to Energy in 1975. Yet, for Wilson, the irony of this move wasthat it occurred at a time when the energy issue was being thrustfurther up the political agenda, and so, this actually increased Benn’sclout within Cabinet. As Benn observed:

I was dismissed by Wilson … He told me later that if I had not agreedto go he would have taken charge of the Department … It was ademotion and yet I think I went up in the pecking order in Cabinet… I think Wilson did not realise that he gave me Energy in 1975, justat the moment that the oil was beginning to bubble ashore.

The three departments were kept separate throughout the rest ofLabour’s period in office. Subsequently, in 1979, the Department ofPrices and Consumer Protection was abolished as it had no role to playgiven the ideological outlook of the new Conservative government.Industry and Trade were kept apart until 1983, but, by this stage, thegeneral feeling within the government, as it pursued a policy of privati-sation, was that such a division was no longer tenable. They weretherefore merged back together and initially placed under the ministe-rial control of Cecil Parkinson.

The Department of Energy

Of our four departments, the Department of Energy had by far theshortest lifespan. It was originally established in 1942 as the Ministryof Fuel and Power. It was merged into the DTI in 1970, but re-emergedwith its own identity in 1974 as the Department of Energy. The newdepartment had been set up in response to the dual crisis of rising oilprices and the 1974 miners’ strike. As such, it never really developed aclear identity. During the 1970s, the department’s role was very muchone of intervention in the field of energy. However, after 1979 theConservative government was committed to a policy of privatisation.The consequences for the department soon became clear; privatisationpolicy and, in particular, Nigel Lawson’s shift to a market-based energypolicy meant that the department lost its raison d’être. As a now retiredsenior energy official argued:

The largest change between the two governments was that duringthe 1970s, the Labour government believed that you should have an


energy policy and, indeed, we did produce a Green Paper in about1977–8 which was the last paper ever produced on energy policy inthis country. Nigel Lawson on the other hand said that there was nosuch thing as an energy policy, arguing that energy is a product likeanything else, it can be traded and so should be part of our widereconomic and industrial policy … He made a speech at Church Hillcollege to an assembly of energy economists when he declared therewas no such thing as an energy policy and he attached an awful lotof weight to that.

Another senior energy official concurred with the view that Lawsonsaw no need for an energy policy and that the natural logic of such aposition was to signal the demise of the Department.

The thrust of his [Lawson] reasoning was that there was no need foran energy policy division and that disappeared very quickly. InLawson’s view what was important was to get these industries priva-tised and that became the big motivation for the EnergyDepartment and gave it a direction. But when that actually gotunder way and there was less international pressure on energy andthe Department had got smaller and smaller, then clearly there wasonly one logic and that was to merge what was left with the DTI.

Nigel Lawson confirmed this analysis:

My belief was that what was needed in the energy field was to applyeconomic principles, which included privatisation – the marketapproach … There was this whole nonsense of treating energy as aspecial case. There is no more reason why you should conserveenergy than you should conserve food. It was part of this myth thatenergy was special, which came into fashion when OPEC camealong with its oil embargo and everyone thought we were going torun out of energy and everything would grind to a halt.

Consequently, in April 1992, the few functions that were left weretransferred either to the Department of Trade and Industry or theDepartment of Environment. So, the Department of Energy providesan interesting contrast with the DTI. The DTI was essentially reorgan-ised for political reasons; in contrast, the break up of Energy was drivenby the Conservatives’ neo-liberal ideological views.


The Department of Social Security

The DSS in its present guise was formed in 1988 when it was split fromHealth. It is important to point out that, in the postwar period, theDepartment of (Health and) Social Security, underwent regular, andsubstantial, structural reorganisation. Such structural changes were areflection of various governments’ attempts to fulfil the commitmentslaid down by the Beveridge Report (see Rose 1993) and referred to asthe welfare settlement (see Cronin 1991; Hay 1996). To understandwhy this is so, one must appreciate the nature of social welfare. A keycomponent of the postwar settlement was the Attlee government’sdevelopment of the welfare state. The state took responsibility awayfrom voluntary and charitable organisations for the provision anddelivery of social welfare. A newly organised bureaucratic state wasregarded as the most effective means of delivering social welfare, in theform of health care, education, housing, insurance, social security andpensions, for the whole nation (see Butcher 1995). Given these princi-ples, there was a logic to linking Health and Social Security in onedepartment and this occurred in 1968 during the era of the ‘super-departments’ and under the ministerial direction of Richard Crosman.

However, the 1988 split provides the most interesting case study.One, now retired, senior official who spent his lifetime in the D[H]SSargued that one of the key reasons for the split was that the demandsplaced upon the single ministry had become too great: ‘There were allthese junior ministers in the old department [DHSS] but only oneSecretary of State and that was why Health was split from SocialSecurity. It simply placed too much demand upon one person.’Another retired senior official concurred:

During the 1980s, it was gradually becoming more obvious thatthe DHSS was getting bigger and bigger, trying to negotiate with theHealth Service on the one hand and build a pension scheme on theother. It was becoming apparent that the job was simply becomingtoo big. We were trying to reform Social Security at the time and thewhole of the Health Service at the same time – it was too much. It wasthe Prime Minister who took the decision, but it became more a ques-tion of where do you split it – does Personal Social Services go withHealth or Social Security and so on. Where do you draw the line?

In the months leading up to the break-up of the department, officialsoutside the two most senior grades were not aware that a split was


imminent. For example, one official, who at the time was a Grade 3,argued: ‘Well, it all came as a bit of a surprise because one of my col-leagues had actually been working on a new system of co-ordinationon both sides of the Department and he had just brought this tofruition when it was split.’

From our interviews, it became clear that the primary reason fordividing the two departments was organisational; the DHSS had simplybecome too big. However, underpinning this was the fact that the thenincumbent Secretary of State, John Moore, did not have the politicalcharacter required to drive through major reform on both the Healthand the Social Security sides which, by the mid-1980s, theConservatives had been pursuing. As one senior DSS official observed:‘I think it is quite possible that if say Kenneth Clarke had been theSecretary of State of the Department it would not have been split.’Another official was far more blunt in his assessment:

I think it was all proving physically too much for John Moore. Ithink at the time the Conservatives had no one else around whothey wanted to appoint to that position and who was capable ofdriving both agendas through and so could have done the job betterthan Moore. His problem was that, in a sense, he wanted to inno-vate along Thatcher lines but he did not have the vision intellectu-ally or the personality to keep the show on the road.

As such, the split-up of the DHSS is an example of a case in which theprime reason behind the split was simply organisational; the depart-ment had become too large. However, there was also a political dimen-sion to the reorganisation. In 1988, the leadership of the ConservativeParty felt there was no one available on the backbenches (or elsewhere)with the requisite talent to drive through two major programmes ofreform on both the Health and Social Security sides. The only logicalstep was to divide the department and so greatly reduce the pressuresand demands on the two new Secretaries of State.

The Home Office

The Home Office differs from our other departments in that, despite itslongevity as an institution (it was founded in 1782), it has, untilrecently, never undergone a fundamental process of restructuring orreorganisation. The Home Office is also a rather unusual departmentbecause of its eclectic range of functions which include: criminal


policy, equal opportunities, immigration, fire, emergency planning,gambling, the Royal Family, MI5 and the Forensic Science Service. Suchdiversity has prompted officials (normally from other departments) tolabel the Home Office as the ‘dumping ground of Whitehall’. Such alabel is misleading. It is not the case that certain functions have beenmoved from other departments to the Home Office. In fact, the processhas been the exact opposite. During the last 200 years, the HomeOffice has continually had functions stripped from it as new depart-ments of state have been created. As the above list shows, this has leftthe present department responsible for a disparate collection of resid-ual functions.

Despite the diversity of the functions for which it is responsible, theHome Office has, even during the managerial reforms of the 1980s and1990s, shown great tenacity in resisting fundamental reorganisation.As one recent Home Office Permanent Secretary observed:

There has never been a fundamental restructuring of the depart-ment. I never felt that there was a case for turning the Home Officeupside down. I felt that the organisation I had inherited, the struc-ture I had taken over, was broadly right and I am not one formaking changes.

It was this type of self-confident attitude which helped the Home Officegain the reputation elsewhere in Whitehall, which has persisted intothe 1990s, of being an arrogant and aloof department (see Chapter 4).

Ironically, for a department so impervious to change, it is possible toargue that, since 1997, the Home Office has done more to reorganiseitself than any other Whitehall department. As a contemporary seniorofficial in the Home Office pointed out, even in the mid-1990s:

The Department was fragmented into stove pipes. Directorateswhich had major policies which affected other areas of theDepartment would pursue their directions from the ministers withvery little contact with other parts of the Department. There was nopolicy centre, no strategy unit and very little central programmingand financial management.

Such observations from a very senior official in the Home Office indi-cate the degree to which the Home Office had successfully resistedmuch of the managerial reforms the rest of Whitehall underwentduring the 1980s–1990s. The Department had remained hierarchical,


inward looking and unresponsive to change. The same official arguedthat part of the problem had been the rather residual corporate natureof the Home Office, which in part reflected its institutional history:

The big change came with the Civil Service Review and the adop-tion of a single mission statement for the Department. If you lookup the Civil Service Yearbook you will see that the Home Office isdescribed as the Department for England and Wales which dealswith subjects which are no longer the province of any other depart-ment. So it is a negative mission statement. Today (1999), we havethis wonderful statement which took a lot of negotiation: ‘To Builda Safe, Just and Tolerant Society’. We have gone on to break thatdown into seven aims. The point is that the work which the HomeOffice now does can be described entirely by these seven aims … Wehave introduced a new management board and on it we have sevenofficials each responsible for delivering one aim.

In organisational terms, since 1997, the Home Office has certainlypursued a model of organisational reform that, at the very least, repre-sents a break with over 200 years of institutional inertia. As anothercontemporary senior official observed:

By setting horizontal delivery aims we have broken down the verti-cal barriers so prevalent in the Home Office in the form of policychimneys. So the traditional Home Office bastions like criminaljustice policy and police policy and so on now know that policy hasto be made horizontally.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have examined the evolution of central govern-ment over the last 30 years and analysed the forces driving thischange. In our view, such change was mainly driven by political con-siderations, although these were often ad hoc and not part of any grandstrategy. Indeed, in our view the Conservatives did not begin with,neither did they develop, a coherent plan for reforming central govern-ment. Rather, their programme of reform was undertaken in a broadlyad hoc manner as a number of largely separate responses to a series ofideological, managerial and organisational critiques of central govern-ment. In retrospect, it is clear that such an approach contained anumber of contradictions that led to a series of unintended outcomes.


Overall, in our view, most prior explanations of the process ofreform are based upon a zero sum conceptualisation of power. So, weare critical of those accounts (Campbell and Wilson 1995; Foster andPlowden 1996) which argue that 18 years of Conservative administra-tion led to the replacement of the traditional ‘Whitehall paradigm’ bya new ‘minister-dominated’ paradigm. Instead, we argue, followingRhodes, that power in the core executive should be conceptualised interms of a series of interdependencies based on resource exchange.From this perspective, while the Conservatives were broadly successfulat realigning the balance of power in favour of ministers, there weredifferent relationships between ministers and civil servants across dif-ferent departments, to some extent depending on the personalitiesinvolved, but nowhere was the relationship one of total executivedominance.

As such, most accounts over-simplify the complex array of dynamicsinvolved in a highly complicated set of relationships between thevarious actors located within the core executive. Using a power-depen-dency model, subsequent chapters in this book will attempt to shedlight on the various complex set of relationships which occur in andaround the terrain of Whitehall departments by examining the indi-vidual sets of actors involved; ministers, the Prime Minister, civil ser-vants, interest groups and European officials. In the next chapter, weexamine the impact of these structural and cultural changes in the1980s and 1990s on the policy and organisational cultures of our fourdepartments.

4Departmental Cultures

As we saw in Chapter 2, there is a contested idea of Whitehall culturethat frames the actions of civil servants. In addition, there are also par-ticular departmental cultures. These cultures reflect the broaderWhitehall culture but also, to some extent, the activities of individualpoliticians and the imprint of the external world on the policy process.Departmental cultures are the result of past decisions, policy, organisa-tions and beliefs. They reflect a combination of grounded philosophi-cal beliefs, competing sets of ideas and entrenched policy decisions.They have functional (what they do), philosophical (the ideas thatunderpin what they do) and relational (the impact of relationshipswith both the rest of Whitehall and the outside world) elements.Consequently, they define the nature and role of the department,including its pecking order in the Whitehall hierarchy, and oftenfavour a set of long-term solutions to particular policy problems.

Essentially, department cultures are structured patterns that providethe framework within which officials and ministers act. They containan organisational element that structures the processes of policy-making and a policy element which structures the content of policy-making. However, they are not determining partly because they areopen to interpretation – cultures are not fixed meanings and there israrely a single departmental culture. More importantly, because one ofthe crucial Whitehall rules is that ministers are key actors, ministerialauthority literally means they are authors of the department’s actions.In addition, they have a set of other resources to draw on, for example,ideology, civil service loyalty, prime ministerial support and electoralmandates, so they can challenge the pre-existing culture of the depart-ment. As we will see here and in Chapter 6, one of the central concernsin relation to culture is how ministers react to the cultural frameworks

69


they find when they join a department. Chapter 2 demonstrated thatthere have been attempts to change the broader Whitehall culture andin Chapter 3 we saw that there have also been important structuralchanges in the organisation of Whitehall and departments. The aim ofthis chapter is to see how a combination of cultural change, structuralreform and individual ministers have impacted on the organisationaland policy cultures of our departments.

This chapter will examine the cultures of our four departments andhow they have changed. It will focus on two elements of culture: thepolicy culture, that is, the way certain beliefs and ideologies underlinethe agenda; and the organisational culture, that is the rules of thegame and the perspective which underpin the roles of officials and theway policy is made within the department. Our claim is that cultureshapes both the development and content of policy and the roles andrelationships of the key actors in the department but it is not static anda combination of external factors and actions by agents can changecultures. Hitherto much literature has suggested either that ministerscan have a significant effect on a department (Headey 1974) orminimal impact (Rose and Davies 1994). As such, this chapter will lookat the nature of, and patterns of change in, the policy cultures in ourfour departments and examine the extent to which the change isdependent on the actions of ministers. It will also examine how thedepartments have responded to the broader changes in the Whitehallculture and to the pressures for better management. For this reason theDepartment of Energy is largely excluded here as most significant cul-tural change in Whitehall occurred after its demise. The chapter willbegin by examining the Home Office.

The Home Office

The policy culture of the Home Office is more defined by its philosoph-ical base than is the case for any of our other departments. It is adepartment that is fundamentally concerned with the problem oforder and its culture revolves around the issues of the individual versusthe state and liberty versus order. Of course, these philosophical con-cerns reflect its functions such as immigration, prisons and law andorder. At the same time, its elevated position within the Whitehallpecking order, its relative isolation from all but a number of selectedinterest groups and its lack of executive functions mean it has alwaysbeen a particularly insulated department.

Departmental Cultures 71

There has been a clearly identifiable Home Office culture, the originsof which can be traced back to the interwar years, which endures tothe present day. This culture reflects an attempt to find a balancebetween maintaining civic order and ensuring the liberty of the indi-vidual (see Callaghan 1982: 10). In the last sixty years, two values,those of state intervention to ensure social order and libertarianism todefend individual liberty, have been fundamental precepts aroundwhich the Home Office culture has evolved. During the postwarperiod, these two values have sometimes appeared complementary andat other times contradictory. As a serving official argued:

The Home Office has always been concerned, ever since it wasfounded in the eighteenth century, with how to reconcile the inter-ests of the state with the rights of the individual. You can boil downvirtually everything that has gone on in the Home Office to thecentral dilemma of balancing those two concerns. Despite beingregarded as reactionary in some quarters, I think we have alwaysbeen conscious of the need to encroach on the rights of individuals,to assert the rights of the state, as little as possible. We have alwaysbeen preoccupied with that central question.

The balance of liberty versus order has been affected by the positionof governments, external pressures and internal conflicts. As oneserving Grade 2 pointed out, there are clear sectional cultures in theHome Office:

You must also realise that there are cultures within cultures. I cansee a different approach to life between the operational immigrationservice side and the case working side. The latter tends to be muchmore cautious whereas the former is much more go getting.

As a former Home Secretary said: ‘there is not a Home Office view;there is a divisional view – particularly in the prisons division’.

From 1945 until the late 1950s, social conservatism was the domi-nant strain within the Home Office. Social conservatism structured thepolicy options faced by ministers and to the extent they accepted the policy agenda of department. However, the progressive spirit of the1960s left its mark on the cultural outlook of the Home Office. Thecombination of greater liberalism in society and a liberal HomeSecretary, Roy Jenkins, resulted in an important cultural change in the


1 At least two of the officials we interviewed either left the Home Office orresigned because of the direction of penal policy in the latter years of theThatcher administration.

department. Throughout both his spells as Home Secretary, Jenkinsinfluenced Home Office attitudes in favour of liberalising laws affectinghuman behaviour. As one official, who served in the Home Office forover 30 years, observed: ‘Jenkins not only liberalised the criminaljustice system, but was responsible for changing the culture of thewhole Department with his progressive approach in the field of abor-tion and the treatment of homosexuals.’

What is interesting is the extent to which Jenkins’ period in theHome Office shaped the thinking and attitudes of the officials in thatdepartment for the next 25 years. Social liberalism remained in theascendancy, even after the change of government in 1979. Not onlywas there broad consensus and continuity in policies under MerlynRees and William Whitelaw, but social liberalism continued to informand influence Home Office thinking in the policy-making process.Effectively the culture of social liberalism shaped the world-view ofofficials; they were socialised into the view that their role was toproject the rights of individuals and this provided the framework ofadvice to ministers. As one former official said:

The Home Office, it is weird, given its public image, did contain alot of quite liberal minded people who when you scratched themcare strongly about individual civil liberties and about the integrityof government’s dealings with individual citizens.

Consequently, during the 1990s, it was a shock to officials to be facedwith a Home Secretary like Michael Howard whose goal was to enforcea ‘prison works’ philosophy and, as a consequence, a number of seniorofficials left; so deep was their belief that the Home Office should be aliberal organisation.1

The strength of the liberal policy culture and the way it structuredpolicy outcomes is indicated by the policies of the Conservativeadministration after 1979. Despite the consistent use of strong rhetoricon crime by various Conservative Home Secretaries, in policy termsthere was little to distinguish the 1980s from the preceding Labouryears. The culture provided the frame of reference within which bothofficials and ministers made decisions. Although ministers may seethemselves as actors who want to pursue policies, they are still con-


strained by the cultural milieu of the department. Even right-wingConservative ministers found themselves developing policy within thecontext of the existing policy agenda. So, even as late as 1989, theformer Home Secretary, David Waddington felt:

You were very much given the impression, when you went to theHome Office, that governments came and went and ministers comeand go but things went on as they had always done. That they hadresponsibilities which went far wider than the political concerns ofministers who were here one day and gone the next and they had tooperate grand empires whether it was the Prisons or theImmigration service and it was a fair assumption that, whicheverparty was in office, they would expect those functions to be per-formed in very much the same way.

A former Permanent Secretary was perhaps unintentionally revealingwhen he said:

Ministers will come in, perhaps rebelling against (the Home Officeculture). But a strong minister will listen and will assess for himselfor herself, what is the strength of the department, what are thereasons for it and whether he seeks to modify the department’s posi-tion, or his own in the light of departmental advice, that will varyfrom time to time.

However, when Waddington replaced Hurd in 1989, he was the firstpro-capital punishment, socially conservative, Home Secretary duringthe Thatcher era. To some, it appeared that Thatcher wanted an endto the dominance of social liberalism within the Home Office; thathere was a conscious attempt by Thatcher to change the policyculture of the department. One contemporary Home Office officialcommented: ‘There was a felt need in the Conservative governmentthat a show of strength was required and that the voice of DavidWaddington should be the sort being heard, rather than that of aHurd, Brittan or Whitelaw.’ However, as Waddington admits: ‘Irealised that, if you wanted to bring about radical change, it would bea very hard slog.’

Kenneth Baker, Major’s first Home Secretary, was generally regarded,later on in his ministerial career, as being on the Thatcherite wing of theConservative Party, but both he and his successor, the more liberal KenClarke, left no significant mark during their spells in office (respectively1990–2 and 1992–3). Baker said that, although he wanted to increase


police numbers, he was very much constrained by circumstances fromchanging the agenda of the department. This indicates how even in the1990s the liberal agenda was continuing to shape policy. In fact, his mainpolicy goal was liberal prison reform which he saw as being consistentwith the policy of previous Home Secretaries.

In 1993, Michael Howard was appointed Home Secretary. He was thefirst Conservative Home Secretary to have both the time and inclina-tion to develop an alternative agenda. From his own perspective therewas much to do: ‘The Home Office, together perhaps with theDepartment of Education, seemed completely untouched by all thechanges that had affected other departments in the period since 1979.It just had not changed.’ Howard picked up on the themes tentativelyoutlined during the Waddington era in order to shift the priorities ofthe department away from individual liberty towards civil order. In aninterview, Howard recalled:

I looked for effective policies which would change these things. Ithought you could do something about crime. I thought the policewere demoralised – the whole of the criminal justice system theyfelt, with some justification, was weighted against them.

Nowhere was this desire for change more clearly encapsulated than inone of the labels associated with his spell in the Home Office – ‘PrisonWorks’. As one official suggested:

I think there was a great trend, which Howard has reversed, ofgreater liberalism in penal matters, real endeavours to reserveprison for people who really had to go to prison and not simplyclutter them up with people who had only defaulted on fines. Agreater use of cautions, of alternative penalties and a greateremphasis on probation. All these things Howard has reversed. RoyJenkins was a Home Secretary who believed prison was an expen-sive way of making bad people worse. Howard’s doctrine is theexact opposite.

Another official also emphasised the change:

I don’t think that he [Howard] has changed the direction of theHome Office in a narrow sense of the institution, but I think the


whole debate has shifted. Clearly he played a part in that, so theclimate is very different in a way. I think you have put your fingeron an interesting phenomenon about the Home Office. Jenkins wasnot the first Labour Home Secretary under the Wilson governmentand Howard was not the first Tory Home Secretary. The big changescame with changes in personality, not changes of party.

During the 1990s, Michael Howard attempted to change the policyculture of the Home Office. However, there was much resistance byofficials to the new line and, whilst there have been many changes inpolicy, it is too early to know whether there has been a permanentchange in culture. Whilst Jack Straw has continued the trend to socialconservatism, only time will tell whether the views of officials havesignificantly shifted to the extent that the culture of the departmenthas changed. At present, the picture is confusing. One senior officialclose to Straw suggested that he was actually moving back to moreliberal policies:

I think what’s actually happening is there is a Home Secretary whois certainly very keen to be serious and tough on crime but not nec-essarily to use a huge prison population as the instrument and veryprepared to try to get the prison population down but wanting todo that in a sort of measured way. Odd bits and pieces are graduallybeing put in place and I think that two or three years on we shouldsee a prison population that’s lower than we expect.

However, the more consistent line of most senior Home Officeofficials is that, while Jack Straw has been willing to consult morewidely than his predecessor, and hence there has been a change instyle, the substance of the law and order agenda has remained similarto Howard’s. Indeed, this can be seen by examining the content ofthe ‘Crime and Disorder’ Bill published in December 1997. On thisbasis, it will take time, and perhaps a Home Secretary with a clearlydiscernible liberal agenda, to determine the extent of the culturalchange in the Home Office.

Nevertheless, the case of the Home Office does illuminate an impor-tant theoretical problem. The suggestion is that the department had anentrenched culture which survived well into the Thatcher years.Moreover, the argument derived from cultural theory is that cultureconstrains the activity of actors. Yet, it appears that Howard was able


to change the direction of the department relatively easily. Thisaccount given of culture change is essentially agency-centred. So,whilst we have a theory that attempts to reconcile agency and struc-ture, the empirical account of change is substantially agency-based.How do we account for this paradox?

Part of the explanation derives from the nature of the British consti-tution and the subsequent perceived roles of ministers and officials. Aswe saw in the last chapter, one of the rules of the game is officialloyalty; it is a crucial element of the culture of the officials to serve theminister. Consequently, officials were quite prepared to set the direc-tion of the Home Office when ministers allow them to do so, but,when a minister wanted a new policy direction, they did, despite someresistance, oblige. As a former Permanent Secretary said:

In the past there wasn’t a lot of active policy coming out of thepolitical system, quite a lot of it was coming out of the officialsystem. But the moment you get a really strong ideological drivecoming out of the political system which a new government willtend to have, the official system accommodates to that, gettingmore into compromise.

Moreover, the change in direction did not occur purely as a conse-quence of the volition and will of the minister. The new policy agendareflected wider structural factors. Firstly, Howard had the support ofthe Prime Minister which is an important structural resource in theWhitehall world. Secondly, there was considerable concern amongstthe electorate and the Conservative Party about rising levels of crimeand the apparent inadequacy of liberal approaches to penal policy.Therefore, Howard’s agenda was not developed in a vacuum but inresponse to widespread societal concerns.

Nevertheless, the cultural constraints on ministers in the HomeOffice are significant. Howard may have changed policy more thanculture but, for instance, he faced determined resistance, as manyHome Secretaries have, to plans for a harsher prison regime. KennethBaker suggested that, ‘The Home Office is not really susceptible toshort term intervention as the Home Office goes on. There is verylittle that a Home Secretary can do – as Michael Howard found out –it rolls on.’

How the Home Office view is impressed on ministers was revealed byBaker and Howard. Baker said that he was given a forecast of the


increase of crime and the rate of crime was shown to increase ‘irrespec-tive of any policy changes’. For Howard there was a view:

that the problems the Home Office faced were different – that theywere intractable and there was nothing you could do about risingcrime … I was actually told in one of my first briefings, I was showna graph that showed the growth in rising crime, and that the firstthing I had to learn was that there was nothing I could do about it…It always had and always will increase. I think that was a verypowerful view in the Home Office.

The culture of the department shaped official advice to ministers and in asense dictated the power/knowledge framework of decision-making.However, the actions of ministers are not determined by this frameworkbecause they often have their own ideological value system to draw onand the resources which derive from their ministerial position which theycan use to force departments to accept policy change.

Organisational culture

Whilst there appears to be a change in the policy culture of the depart-ment with a move from a focus on individual liberty to one on socialorder, there is also a second important issue concerning the extent towhich broader cultural changes in Whitehall (see Chapter 2) haveaffected the culture of the Home Office. The Home Office is widely per-ceived as resistant to change. Traditionally, the Home Office was thearchetypal Whitehall department conforming closest to the YesMinister stereotype. First, senior officials were closely involved in thepolicy process. Their key role was as policy advisers and, to someextent, the policy process resembled the seminar approach to policy-making where a number of key officials would sit around bouncingideas around until a solution emerged. As one former PermanentSecretary claimed:

Perhaps 10 or 12 people would spend the morning discussing, forexample, majority verdicts (for Juries), which is what we brought in,which was a very important change. It is very difficult to say thatthe policy was decided by the Permanent Secretary or theDepartment or by the minister, it really developed from an inter-change of views. I thought this was perhaps the Whitehall machine atits best [our emphasis].


Second, in the Home Office, the role of ministers was to carry outdepartmental policy. One official in the prison service recalled thisconversation:

The first meeting that Derek (Lewis) and I attended when we cameto the Prison Service was an under-secretary’s meeting and I remem-ber a very powerful member of that group was talking and we askedwhat is the relationship with the Home Office and she said: ‘We’vegot seven ministers who do not understand what we are doing, haveno coherent ideology, no coherent philosophy and we’ve just got toget in there and educate them.’ I was absolutely staggered … it wasjust the orthodoxy that the Home Office knew best.

This outsider’s view was confirmed by a long-serving formerPermanent Secretary and a number of others who served in the 1960sand 1970s. The Home Office view was that the role of ministers was toserve the department and it was officials who were the experts andunderstood the problems and therefore ministers should take theiradvice. Hence, Home Office officials expected ministers to deliver forthe department and not rock the boat.

Third, the Home Office has often been perceived as arrogant, isolatedand hierarchical. One former Permanent Secretary when asked if theHome Office was arrogant said: ‘Very much so’. A number of inter-viewees pointed out how hierarchical the Home Office was and sug-gested that, when compared to the Treasury, it was much less collegial.Indeed, it was only with Roy Jenkins that all minutes to the ministerstopped going through the Permanent Secretary. There was also a ten-dency for people to stay within the Home Office throughout theircareers. According to one former Permanent Secretary:

It was a rather self-contained department … it was less involved ingeneral central government processes than many other depart-ments, it had very much its own self-contained responsibilities …And particularly on its main field of dealing with police matters,with criminal justice, with the prison service, it felt very much thatthis was its business and it got on with that business and it didn’tneed to consult with other government departments

There are a number of suggestions that, because of its isolation andinnate superiority, the Home Office has been slow to respond to pres-sure for greater managerialism. As one official said:


The Department has changed only a bit. If you give most of them abudget they will run a mile because they don’t know what it is.They haven’t got a clue about managing money. There are somepeople who can do it. [A current senior civil servant in the HomeOffice] has more idea about money and about what the role ofmoney is or how you get it or what it matters to the Home Office.But he is not a manager, he is a policy adviser.

The same official argued that, unlike in other departments, even in1997, Grade 2s were still involved in detailed policy-making: ‘One ofthe things that is different about the Home Office … is that people atthe top of the office still write their own memos.’ One recent formerPermanent Secretary admitted: ‘Because the Home Office had beenstrong on law and order, which was sacrosanct in the 1980s, it hadpowerful ministers who could get the money they wanted and protectthe Department from change.’

However, another official argued that there had been change: ‘Wehave adopted the delayering principle and the work has been pusheddown.’ He also claimed both that, as a Grade 2, he was ‘much more ofa manager/director’ and that the role of the Permanent Secretary wasno longer that of ‘chief policy adviser’. He also suggested that morepolicy advice was coming from outside the department:

It may well be that my colleagues and I might end up doing someinnovative policy thinking but if you look at the Labour manifesto,if you look at the actual words that have gone into it, then you cansee the tips of several tiny icebergs. If you look at the work of theConstitution Unit outside government, I think you might be seeingsome kind of change of emphasis. More research has been done,more discussions held and we are being seen as the kind of opera-tors and administrators and I think that is not necessarily a badthing as our expertise lies in making things happen in terms of legis-lation, finance and mobilisation of people. But we do not have amonopoly of wisdom.

This perspective indicates the extent to which the views of at leastsome civil servants in the Home Office have changed. From the1950s they were the key policy makers and management was forexecutive officers, but in the 1990s their role is to manage and facili-tate policy-making.


The Home Office was the slowest department to react to changes inWhitehall after 1979. Its arrogance and insularity enabled it to resistsome of the pressure for management change. In addition, many of theHome Secretaries in the 1980s were either happy to accept the cultureof the department or were so overwhelmed by everyday events thatchange was not possible. The public service ethos, and the autonomy itbestowed on officials, remained strong in the Home Office and therewas strong resistance to the culture of NPM. However, in the 1990sthere was a change in the policy culture with a shift to a more sociallyconservative framework; a shift in the relationship between ministersand officials, with ministers wanting the Home Office to serve themrather than to debate the pros and cons of a policy; and a decline inthe hierarchical nature of the Department as a result of the SMR. As inother departments, the policy role was pushed further down the hierar-chy. The relationship of dependency between ministers and officialshas changed with ministers becoming more directive in terms of thepolicy direction of the department. One Home Office PermanentSecretary summed up this change:

I feel that all permanent secretaries wherever you go spend moretime in the managerial role than they did fifteen years ago. A lot ofthe business of the Home Office, especially on the law side, isextremely difficult stuff. I’d say roughly I do a managerial part, apolicy part and an accounting officer part of the job. The balancedepends on the time. I see my role as reading vast volumes of paperevery night and I read what goes though and if I feel things havenot gone right I will intervene. If I feel the Home Secretary is doingsomething wrong I will intervene and say ‘this is wrong’. I’d briefmyself and go and see him about it. If people came to see me andsaid they were worried about something that was going on I wouldthink about it and then go and see the Home Secretary.


Policy culture: free trade ethos vs interventionism

The two distinct elements of the DTI draw upon two different philo-sophical traditions; on the trade side laissez faire and on the industryside intervention. These philosophical traditions reflect and reinforcethe different functions of the two departments and their different rela-tionships with business and industry. The Department of Industryeffectively was created in order to intervene in the economy and devel-


2 As Chapter 9 demonstrates within the context of the EU a purely Britishtrade policy no longer exists. Britain is represented in the WTO through theEU.

oped important relationships with industry through the creation ofsponsorship divisions within the department (see Chapter 4). TheDepartment of Trade was created to ensure smooth trade policy andtrade relationships with other nations. Subsequently, it has favouredfree trade over protectionism. Moreover, its policy is clearly developedwithin the context of the international political economy and transna-tional policy structures, such as Bretton Woods, GATT, the EuropeanUnion and the World Trade Organisation, which place major con-straints on the sorts of policies that can be developed.2 The trade sideof the DTI probably has one of the most persistent and influential cul-tures in Whitehall. Since the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Board ofTrade has strongly advocated free trade and very few ministers,whether Labour or Conservative, have not succumbed to the free tradeethos. As one former Permanent Secretary reported:

In the Department of Trade there was a strong Cobdenite free tradeethos. And, I think it is fair to say that almost anyone who served inthat department at any respectable level became infected with it, upto and including the Secretary of State …

A senior trade official admitted: ‘most of us who work on the trade side… are personally fairly convinced of the merits of trade liberalisation’.Moreover, because of the technical and bipartisan nature of the workin trade, officials have a broad degree of discretion when conductingtrade policy negotiations. Officials see themselves judging the minis-ter’s preferences and negotiating within a given context. However, theframework of beliefs within which a trade official negotiates empha-sises free trade and this clearly influences policy outcomes. As oneofficial acknowledged:

On the trade side – I have worked in the trade area on and off most ofthe time since 1960 – I would say there is a great deal of continuity. Isuppose historically Labour governments have been somewhat moreready to look at protectionist measures or restrictions on free trade fornon-trade reasons. But, I would say that both parties have switched toa liberal direction. The Labour Party, if anything, more so.


Although there have been significant changes in policy and culture onthe Industry side of the department, Trade has avoided any radicalchanges in direction.

The culture on the Industry side of the department has been very dif-ferent. In the words of a former Permanent Secretary:

The culture of industry was much more a culture of intervention, ofassisting industries which were in difficulty, and assisting areas ofthe country which were in difficulty, or less well served in terms ofemployment.

The roots of the Industry culture were not so much grounded in a com-mitment to interventionism but, rather, in the view that a close rela-tionship between government and industry was crucial (Middlemas1979). As one senior official argued, the Industry side of the depart-ment was based on the notion of sponsorship and advocacy of theinterests of industry: ‘The industry section was driven towards closerrelations with industry itself.’ As another official said, emphasising therelational element of culture: ‘Intervention is the wrong word. It was avery intimate relationship; a knowledgeable relationship and, to someextent, a power relationship. We actually stopped them doing things… ’. This often led officials within Industry to push for protection andthe provision of assistance for particular industries. With theConservatives’ Industry Act of 1972, there was a move towards muchgreater intervention: ‘The Heath period was actually a very interven-tionist period and, in that sense, the Industry side of the departmentwas very much more in line with the Government’s thinking than theold BoT side, which is why it seemed ante-diluvian at the time’.

When Keith Joseph was appointed Secretary of State for Industry in1979, he was confronted by a highly interventionist department. Hisexplicit intention was to change the policy culture by introducing a freemarket policy, but, as we argue in Chapter 6, this was not a success.Following Joseph, Thatcher appointed a succession of ideologically moti-vated ministers, such as Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit and LeonBrittan, who shared a laissez-faire outlook. These ministers produced animportant reorientation in the department’s preferences. Norman Tebbitsuggested that he was able to impose a new frame of reference onofficials:

I built on what Sir Keith Joseph had done. He’d tackled it from anintellectual standpoint and I think he always thought he had to


convince people intellectually of the need for a change, whereas Itended to short-cut the people sometimes and tell them what wasgoing to happen and if they were unconvinced by the arguments itwas tough. So, it was a bit easier in that respect. Just the process ofreducing the number of industries for which we were responsiblewas helpful. I did not find it too difficult.

However, despite clear goals, Tebbit was aware of official oppositionand the need to by-pass their attempts to ameliorate the new agenda:

The trouble I had was over things like regional policy where we hadan exceptionally able woman who was the Deputy or AssistantSecretary and she knew and understood the area and had beeninvolved with the policy for years and was quite emotional about itand the idea of it being scrapped … I think I could not have made itharder for her if I’d told her I was going to slaughter her first born. Ithen realised there was a strong case for moving people in order thatthey did not get emotionally attached to a policy area. She went onin the Civil Service and had a successful career but I just could notget her to accept new ideas in that area, so I moved her.

The changing policy agenda led to something of a crisis of identityfor the DTI, with-right wing critics questioning the basic need for aDepartment of Industry in a government which was supposedly com-mitted to a free-market ideology – a question which has recurred (seeDaily Telegraph, 16 October 1995; Independent, 20 June 1998). Indeed,Young, when taking up his position as Secretary of State, felt that itwas the ‘Department of Disasters’ and had lost its way (Young 1990:237).

As we will see in Chapter 6, it was Lord Young who had the ideasand the will to impose new free-market values on the department.These objectives were obtained by rejecting state intervention and,instead, opting for the discipline of the market, deregulation andadvice to business. For Young, the department’s main role was toinfluence attitudes. Consequently, the foci of the department became:the establishment of a Deregulation Unit, which was concerned witheliminating red tape; the implementation of the Single European Actthrough the single market initiative; and the establishment of the advi-sory division concerned with providing advice to industry.

In essence, despite frequent changes in structure and a major shift inideological direction since 1979, it was only after 1987 that the


significant change in the department’s culture and policy orientationwas consolidated. One official confirmed this analysis:

I think that Lord Young had a very big impact. I do not think thatmany of his predecessors did and I do not think that many of hissuccessors have – even though it might seem that there was oneexception to that, as Michael Heseltine had a great impact in termsof organisation and structure, but I’m not sure if that process hadn’treally started sometime before and the reason he found quite fertileground was because the process had actually started before hearrived so he wasn’t an absolute step change.

Between 1979 and 1997 the nature of the policy culture on theIndustry side changed completely. In 1979, the department wasextremely large, it had a significant budget and it had a panoply ofadministrative and legal mechanisms for intervention in the industries.By 1997, the department had lost most of its interventionist machin-ery, regional policy had disappeared or moved to the EU level and themain focus of its activities was competition policy and deregulation. Interms of public expenditure, it had probably seen the largest reductionof all departments; a cut of at least 65 per cent in its budget. Thischange partly resulted from the decisions and actions of ministers, butthey were assisted by a favourable structural and ideological contextwhich undermined the interventionist role that had previously dic-tated the direction of the department.


Whilst there have been significant changes in the policy culture of theDTI, it has also been greatly affected by the broader changes inWhitehall culture. Maybe more than any other department, itembraced the managerial changes coming from the centre. The will-ingness to change is perhaps a reflection of two factors. First, there wasa succession of ministers ideologically committed to the Thatcheriteproject (or in the case of Heseltine committed to managerialism) and,therefore, they consciously imposed the new culture on the depart-ment. Second, the department’s relationship with the private sectormade it more receptive to managerial thinking. Indeed, the depart-ment, as we saw, has attempted to present itself as the Department ofEnterprise and to encourage efficiency and enterprise. The DTIattempts to present a corporate image of itself in its literature, and


3 Although as is apparent above the DSS makes a very similar claim.

even in its physical surroundings. In 1994, the department wholeheart-edly adopted and implemented the government’s senior managementreview. As one Grade 2 indicated:

I think the DTI probably embraced managerialism more wholeheart-edly than most of Whitehall and I think we had the first Next StepsAgency and developed our Agencies quicker than other depart-ments.3 I think the DTI was perhaps more ready for it, but neededthe impulsion of the FMI or we would not have done the kinds ofthings as quickly as we did without the FMI.

A second official confirmed:

I think the DTI, probably by mid to late 80s, was a bit ahead of thegeneral game in developing its internal management mechanisms.It was a good deal more sophisticated, for example, than anything Ifound in the Treasury; which was absolutely unbelievably awfulwhen I got there in 1992.

The department eliminated a layer of management, accepting that:‘With no unnecessary layers of management, responsibility can be del-egated down the organisation to the point where decisions are mosteffectively made’ (DTI 1995: 21). With this change, there was anexplicit attempt to increase team-working, delegate decision-makingfurther down the hierarchy and improve the collective approach tocross-cutting issues.

Clearly, Grade 2 civil servants in the DTI – what are now calledDirector-Generals – have become increasingly managerial. As one said:

I don’t mind spending my time on management. Indeed, I think Ishould and the balance is about right. The balance is still approxi-mately 60 per cent policy, 40 per cent management but I think tenyears ago it would have been 90 per cent policy and 10 per centmanagement.

A former Permanent Secretary said that when he joined the Board ofTrade in the early 1950s ‘management scarcely existed within theservice’.


However, there are still those who question the impact of the SMR.One contemporary civil servant suggested that the SMR was ‘a verycurious thing in the DTI’ and that the changes which occurred weremore a ‘reflection of personal style of the DG than anything else in aworld in which they were looking for a certain level of cuts … I thinkhere the whole experience was immensely dispiriting’. Another sug-gested that it was only in theory that the Grade 2s and 3s had a greatermanagerial role: ‘There are a lot of Grade 2s who are very much in thefront line, particularly in the DTI which is, shall we say, an under-managed Department. I would say it hasn’t changed all that much. Iwould have expected it to have changed more.’

Despite the sceptical voices, the DTI seems to have gone throughsignificant change in relation to its policy culture, the role officialsundertake and its organisational culture. The interventionist and cor-poratist culture of the department changed significantly and, ratherthan looking to the state to solve industrial policy, the predominantview is now that markets offer the best solution. In a sense, what wasthe Trade culture has become the dominant culture within the DTI,despite explicit resistance by a number of Industry officials in the early1980s. Likewise, organisational culture has undergone significantchange. The DTI was always a relatively open department in the senseof having strong links with particular external interests and increas-ingly with the EU (see Buller and Smith 1998; and below Chapter 9)and it therefore seemed relatively open to the influences of managerial-ism. It is also apparent that under New Labour, the DTI has continuedto embrace a generally laissez-faire position.


The philosophical base of the DSS was provided by the BeveridgeReport and reinforced by its major function: to provide social welfareto citizens. One retired official reminisced that there was a strongBeveridge imprint on the department: ‘Beveridge, that was very muchthe sort of spirit in which the secretaries and the people I knew grewup. They came up along the Beveridge route and I think they were verymuch heirs to Beveridge.’ Another former Permanent Secretary said:‘We certainly did feel ourselves to be the inheritors of Beveridge.’

Moreover, unlike most departments, it is also an executive depart-ment, delivering services to the public and, thus, has direct contactwith its ‘consumers’. The 1980s, therefore, provided something of aculture shock to the department when many of its key perceptions


about welfare generally, and its role specifically, were challenged. Forexample, Patrick Jenkin faced direct opposition from officials when hetried to break the link between pensions and earnings. He claimed:‘When we said can we have legislation to unlink from earnings therewere long faces and people said, “That’s very difficult legislation”.’ As aDSS official admitted: ‘there was a culture shock around 1979/80; pre-viously people had been roughly bipartisan and believed that resourcespermitting, you ought to expand social security’.

During the postwar period, all governments maintained a commit-ment to the welfare settlement. Despite Conservative criticism ofwelfare policies, political expediency and the institutional entrench-ment ensured that any reform of the welfare settlement in the 1980swas only incremental (see Bradshaw 1992). However, within this perva-sive welfare paradigm, there has been a significant shift in the policyculture of the DSS. Indeed, rising unemployment, social dislocation,rising expenditure on benefits and a desire to reduce state spendingcreated a crisis in the welfare state. The crisis, again combined with theideological goals of Thatcherism which desired a shift away from thedependency culture, created space for change. However, the nature ofsocial security provision, the fact that many benefits were demand-led,and residual public support for welfare policy, placed major institu-tional constraints on change. Consequently, significant reform onlyoccurred during Peter Lilley’s period as Secretary of State (1992–7), butthe roots of it can be traced back to the Fowler Review of the mid-1980s. The Review, from which the 1986 Social Security Act was devel-oped, introduced a variety of new benefits, which again illustrates thecumulative effort that is often required for institutional change.Despite a number of modifications, both Evans et al. (1994) andGlennerster (1995) have concluded that existing constraints ensuredthat the Act was not radical enough to mark a clear point of departurefrom the existing welfare settlement.

If the Fowler Review was limited, in terms of the tangible effect ithad on the delivery of social security benefits, it was crucial in terms ofthe cultural impact it had on thinking within the department. This isclearly highlighted in the account by a senior DSS official of a meetingto finalise the Review:

We had a very traumatic final meeting, which was meant to be noholds barred, but where one senior official, in particular, sufferedgreatly. He gave Fowler a lecture on the fact that, since 1948, the socialsecurity system had been governed by consensus, that this was


immensely valuable and should not be thrown away. You could hearFowler, a Thatcherite minister, almost spitting at this, recoiling at anysuggestion that the political consensus on, for example, pensionspolicy should be sustained. Not surprisingly, the official’s speech wentdown like a lead-balloon. Afterwards, Fowler had a word with meabout needing to do something about this particular official and I sug-gested it had already happened. The effect had been traumatic andfrom that point on people did start reacting differently.

Thus, the effect of the Review, while not tearing up Beveridge moregenerally, shifted the debate away from the previously acceptedemphasis on the universalism of social welfare towards targetedbenefits and the reintroduction of the voluntary sector’s contributionto welfare provision. The Beveridge-influenced state persisted, but ithad become a shadow of its former self.

In 1992, Peter Lilley was appointed Secretary of State and this coincidedwith the announcement, by the then Chief Secretary to the TreasuryMichael Portillo, of a long-term, fundamental review of social policy.Consequently, Lilley was presented with a particular opportunity throughwhich to push for reform. Moreover, unlike previous spending ministers,Lilley was willing to go along with the Treasury’s demand that his depart-ment cut its spiralling budget. A combination of exogenous pressure forchange from the Treasury and an endogenous shift in attitudes within thedepartment dating back to Fowler created an opportunity for Lilley toalter the department’s policy culture.

Due to the highly complex nature of social security, Lilley did notintroduce radical, wide-sweeping, reform from the outset. As oneofficial noted: ‘Looking back, I doubt if one could argue Lilley was sentthere with a pre-conceived blueprint for social security. It took himtime to affect radical change.’ Lilley instigated wholesale change insocial security payments, through introducing piecemeal, but large-scale, reforms – the introduction of Incapacity Benefits (1995), the JobSeekers Allowance (1996) and the Basic Pension Plus (1997) – whilealso revamping smaller payments – One Parent Benefits (1996) andWar Pensions (1997). The series of reforms introduced by Lilley trans-formed social security. One official explained why he felt Lilley, unlikehis predecessors, was able to leave such a tangible mark:

It was undoubtedly the fact that from his background he did nothave an interest in social policy. His ministerial career and interestswere in trade, industry, macro-economics etc. What that means was


that when he came to social policy, he had a different perspectiveand was extremely interested in examining what social security wasand how it interacted with the wider economy. As such he broughta fresh approach to social security.

Unlike the ideologues in the Home Office and the DTI, Lilley did notconfront the departmental culture directly and, as we will see inChapter 6, he developed a very strategic approach to policy change.

Using a strategic approach, Lilley was able to ameliorate some of theinstitutional and cultural constraints to reform the department. Inaddition, he was also greatly advantaged by his long tenure in officewhich changed the usual imbalance between the permanent officialsand the temporary politician. The fact that Lilley was willing to thinkabout policy, prepare his ground, construct alliances in the departmentand build on the work of the Fowler Review, enabled him to shift theculture and policy preferences of the department. Moreover, he hadthe structural advantage that there was tremendous external pressureto limit the growth of the social security budget and the departmentwas not in a position to deny the financial constraints.

Though he did not immediately produce a blueprint for change,Lilley was successful in changing the department’s mind-set or way ofthinking about welfare. This was partly because DSS officials them-selves accepted that one of the core principles on which the WelfareState had been founded, universality, was no longer sustainable. Inaddition, Lilley, unlike Howard in the Home Office, though clearlystating his agenda, still encouraged his officials to work with himrather than alienating them from the process of change. There was abroad consensus among DSS officials that Lilley’s period as Secretary ofState did leave a clear mark:

Lilley was a strategist who was prepared to think in the long term.Now because of the nature of Social Security, that is a highlyunusual approach. However, his approach worked and it got all ofus to look at welfare through a different set of glasses.


The DSS saw a significant change in its policy culture in the 1980s. Inaddition, of all the departments in this study it went through the mostrapid and radical change in its organisational culture. The DHSS wasalmost a pure, hierarchical, line bureaucracy from its formation. As aformer Permanent Secretary stated:


Something was decided at Headquarters and it would be transmit-ted down the form of instructions called codes, people just had toapply these codes. It told you what to do. You look it up in thecodes what to do in these circumstances and there is a paragraphwritten about it.

Social security, particularly when attached to Health, was an extremelylarge department. By 1970 it employed 120 000 people and was spend-ing half of all public expenditure. Partly for reasons of size and partlybecause of tremendous problems in terms of delivering policy goals,the DHSS paid attention to management issues earlier than otherdepartments. Indeed, as one ex-Permanent Secretary pointed out, theinitial impetus for reform came from the IMF: ‘the policy of reducingthe Civil Service by 25 per cent was effectively IMF policy, although itwasn’t described as such’. The reduction never occurred under Labour,partly because of the imminence of elections, the Lib-Lab pact and thepolitical crisis of the Winter of Discontent in 1978/9. However, planswere developed within the Civil Service Department for such reductionand in the DSS the Principal Establishment Officer started to drive thereductions through after the 1979 election. The same PermanentSecretary said: ‘We drove through what many other departments didn’t… We had 120 Assistant Secretaries in 1970, when we finished we hadabout 80. We took out proportionately more Assistant Secretaries thanwe took out clerks … We had 16 Deputy Secretaries and we lost 4, thesame proportion of under-secretaries and one third of AssistantSecretaries.’ In the early 1980s, the DSS presaged the SeniorManagement Review of the 1990s.

While reducing numbers the DHSS also introduced greater flexibilityand managerialism into the department. With the FMI, the depart-ment introduced management accounting across the board andthroughout the hierarchy. As a former Permanent Secretary argued:

(We required) the under-secretary to submit a management accountfor his division which set its policy aims, policy objectives in themedium term, programme of activity, targets probably for the nextyear and the resources both in terms of people and money at his dis-posal … That was the beginning of the process of introducing man-agement accounting into the DHSS.

In addition, the DHSS introduced the first attempts to move fromhierarchical models of policy-making to team working in which indi-


viduals were chosen for their skills, not their grade, to undertake apolicy review. These ideas did have a significant and direct impact onthe Next Steps developments. Kenneth Stowe, who was PermanentSecretary of the DHSS, became a member of the Next Steps team andused the lessons drawn from the department to influence the team’sfindings.

After this process of managerial reform which started in the 1980s,the department went through two major structural changes. First, in1988 Health and Social Security became separate departments.Second, Social Security embraced the agency concept with moreenthusiasm and radicalism than other departments (see Greer 1994).It effectively established in a pure form a core and periphery depart-ment by dividing the policy-making headquarters from the servicedelivery periphery. As one official centrally involved in the changesdescribed:

I set up six agencies and split the Department not horizontally butvertically into paying benefits, collecting contributions, runningyouth hostels, IT etc., and I have a chief executive in charge of each.I also scrapped all the regions and just had these big local officeswith quite senior people and then myself. So we totally changed thestructure. By scrapping the regions we got rid of 250 middle man-agement posts.

This change impacted directly on the culture of the department.Management took on a much more important role. A PermanentSecretary said: ‘There is much more emphasis on management … thewhole way in which the management of the Department has devel-oped is much more complex now.’ As another official said, the changeshave been an attempt ‘to introduce less traditional ways of working,more readiness to translate private sector-commercial managementtechniques. We have business plans, we have chief executives, the lan-guage is all the language of business.’ However, another senior civilservant who had come from outside Whitehall maintained:

I detected much less of a management focus within the CivilService. There was a lot of talk about management, but really theCivil Service was still, and some would argue still is, dominated bypolicy mandarins. You got promotion, you were valued, if you weregood at policy. If you were not very good at policy, then they gaveyou a management job as a kind of second division.


Although this official questioned the degree of cultural change, he didadmit that things were beginning to change.

This introduction of management language combined with theSenior Management Review has seen a shift away from hierarchicalpolicy-making. As one senior official pointed out:

The arrangement is that I have got a Grade 2 as head of policy andthen he has four Grade 3s who are what we call Policy Directorswho are responsible for the strategic direction of policy and whowill have responsibility for seeing that some of the big policies arecarried through … The benefit based responsibility comes in at thePolicy Manager level, Grade 5. There are 20 to 25 Grade 5s, each ofthem responsible for a particular benefit area, and their responsibil-ity is to see to everything surrounding that benefit … Now a lot ofthe day-to-day work on the detail will be done right the way down.We have submissions going to ministers from HCOs, SCOs, Grade7s. We push that kind of thing further down the Department thanalmost anywhere else.

Whereas even in the early 1980s ministerial briefings were carried outby Grades 1, 2 and 3, now: ‘you rarely have somebody above grade 5; itwould usually be a grade 5 or a grade 7’. With the introduction of‘policy stewardship’, whereby an individual is responsible for thedeveloping and management of particular policy, it may be a Grade 7who ‘takes responsibility for the whole of the spend on their benefit’.In addition: ‘it is generally a Grade 7 doing the oral briefing to theminister, using the briefing that they have produced’ (interview with aGrade 7).

The other change in the DSS is that with only 2 per cent of staff inheadquarters and 98 per cent in agencies, much of the work of thedepartment is about managing departmental–agency relations. This hasagain had a cultural impact because, by making operations distinct andin a sense giving it a separate voice, it means, first, that the notion ofthe DSS as a line bureaucracy has been undermined and, second, thatoperational issues can be put on the agenda. As one senior official said:

It has made the distinction between policy and operations sharper,so it makes it much more difficult for the policy people to ignorethe operational end because we have got a more powerful opera-tional end. You can turn round and say: ‘No you can’t make me dothat. I am telling you how this is, how it is going to be done.’


Whereas I think when they were all merged together without a sep-arate chief executive, it was easier for the operational side to getleaned on …

However, a former Chief Executive of an agency said:

I don’t remember it as being a period of comfortable blanket-likesupport from the centre of the Department. I think it was a fairlyrough ride on many occasions … All the pressure is on you toconform. You showed that you were capable of doing this job bynot rocking the boat too much.

Nevertheless, even this more cynical voice admitted: ‘there was a bettersense of partnership between operations and policy. You see I thinkthat previously one of the problems was that the operation side of theDepartment was largely ignored.’

Certainly, the agency is involved very closely with the department inthe development of policy. As a number of Grade 7s pointed out:‘there is a lot of day-to-day contact with agencies’. Indeed, a Grade 5commented: ‘We have tried to involve them in the earliest possiblestage (of policy development) … there is a manager with a smallnumber of staff and who is now out first point of call.’ So whilst thedepartment is formally responsible for policy-making, it is, in fact,interactive and, thus, the traditional hierarchical and insular culture ofthe department is being challenged. In addition, the agencies have alsobeen concerned to create their own culture, or at least a distinct iden-tity. As one former Chief Executive said: ‘I was trying to create a greatersense of identity within the Agency and also a greater sense of identityamong people who you couldn’t expect to identify with the wholeCivil Services.’

The DSS certainly underwent dramatic changes in its policy andorganisational culture in the 1980s. It shifted from a department whichstill contained the imprint of Beveridge to a department concernedwith managing the move away from universalism. Both theConservative and Labour governments have been concerned with tar-geting benefits and, thus, the policy agenda of the department hasshifted significantly. In addition, the departmental culture has shiftedfrom one based upon hierarchy to one which actively embraces dele-gated management both within its agencies and its policy-making inthe department. The department has also gone through some of thegreatest structural changes and in most cases the relationships with


4 One interviewee pointed out that many of the people who joined the depart-ment in its early days were direct entrant principals who had been workingin the energy industry.

agencies (notwithstanding the CSA) have worked relatively well (seeGains 2000 for details).

The Department of Energy

Policy culture

It is extremely difficult to characterise the culture of the Department ofEnergy (DEn). It was in existence for only a relatively short periodbetween 1974 and 1992 (see Chapter 2 for details). Perhaps more thanany other department, it was defined by its function and its relation-ship with the energy industry, rather than in terms of a particularphilosophical or ideological tradition. In this sense, it has often beenperceived as a department made up of specific divisions captured bytheir respective producer interests. This impression was reinforced byan interchange of personnel between the industries and the depart-ment.4 Some commentators and participants have gone further, sug-gesting that the dominant interest in the department has been thenuclear industry section and that this has defined the direction ofenergy policy (see Benn, 1990; for a more balanced view see Watt1998). In an interview, Benn suggested that nuclear energy was domi-nant in the department for a number of complex reasons:

Well nuclear was very serious … I finally realised that the wholecivil nuclear programme was an absolute fraud; it was about nuclearweapons. And I discovered it because (one person) who had workedin the CEGB wrote to me and said during the whole period you’vebeen Secretary of State for Energy plutonium for our civil nuclearpower stations has been sent to America for their nuclear weaponsprogramme … I discovered then that every nuclear power stationwas a bomb factory. My view changed because I began as a hugeenthusiast for nuclear power. I made marvellous speeches aboutnuclear power. I then went in and learnt it wasn’t safe, wasn’tcheap, wasn’t peaceful. Everything that had been said about it was alie. They didn’t tell ministers the truth, they didn’t publish thetruth, they didn’t tell you the economics of it and they didn’t tellyou what it was about.


As one very senior official who had worked in Energy recalled, much ofthe information provided by the CEGB on costings was inaccurate.However, a Grade 5 in Energy rejected the idea of nuclear dominance:‘There has only been one nuclear power station built, Sizewell, since1985. 1985 was a watershed. I would have said that we were heldhostage by the NUM until 1984.’

Nevertheless, any understanding of the Department of Energy has tobe within the context of its relationships within the industry and thedominant role played by nuclear power. These factors produced a con-tradiction within the heart of the department. On one side, respondingto the crisis situation that led to its formation, it was concerned withproducing a coherent energy policy. On the other, the coherence wasundermined by functional cleavages that led each division to argue aspecial case for its industry. In the view of the former Energy Minister,Peter Walker:

In terms of the Department I went into in 1983 the sections werevery much different sections and there was no co-ordinated depart-ment as such. Oil and Gas had one team of people, Coal hadanother and they were both of different calibre and attitudes. Therewas no strong sense of a great Department of Energy.

A contemporary official reinforced this view in a slightly more posi-tive way:

The culture in Energy was a very deep knowledge of your particularsector … It’s different from the DTI because we in Energy kept verystrong sectional connections.

This sectionalism produced some spectacular anomalies and contradic-tions. For instance, whilst overall policy was shifting towards privatis-ing electricity, reducing the dependence on coal and diminishing thesize of the coal industry, investment in coal mines was continuing toincrease during the 1980s (Chapman 1999).

In a sense, the culture of the department was defined by three interre-lated elements: its functionality; its relationships with the producers;and, deriving from these two, its concern to produce some sort ofcoherent energy policy, or at least to ensure the supply of energy. Inthis sense, the culture of the department in the early 1980s was veryclose to that of Industry. As Peter Walker said: ‘In fact Energy is so inter-related with Industry in every possible way, it’s lunatic to have it as a


separate department.’ Therefore, it too was concerned with interventionand planning and as one interviewee (a former Grade 2) indicated:

Well if you had the coal people saying we must produce more coal,and make Central Electricity Generating buy the bloody stuff, youthen had CEGB and people from the electricity division sayingquantify the cost because there is a lot of oil capacity which isn’tused and we would like to use oil. These views came together at theDeputy Secretary level and the Deputy Secretary then had toproduce a department view, if he was able to do so.

Nigel Lawson provides a useful summary of the culture from his per-spective:

First of all they believed strongly, although they were not quite clearwhat it was, in a thing called energy policy and that energy wassomehow special, rather than a part of the economy which shouldbe subject to the same policies as the rest of the economy … I thinkthey saw energy policy in two ways. One was making grandiose pro-jections of the likely demand for energy some way into the futureand then saying how much would be satisfied by coal, how muchby oil, etc., and then consequently asking what decisions needed tobe made to meet these targets … It was a modified form of centralplanning. They were greatly encouraged by the fact that the EnergySecretary had the highest proportion of state owned industries.However, the energy officials were in the poor position of beingmiddle men crushed between the Treasury on the one hand and thebarons of the state owned electricity, gas, coal and to some extentoil. They had a very unhappy relationship with most of these bar-onies who treated the official with a greater or lesser degree of con-tempt. They kept officials in the dark about a lot of fundamentalaspects of the industry, because knowledge is power and they likedto keep it to themselves. They often did not know themselves. Theclassic case was the true cost of nuclear power which was certainlyconcealed from my officials in the Department.

Peter Walker, from a different ideological perspective, agrees that,despite the desire for a co-ordinated energy policy, there was ‘no lovelything called an energy policy’. Nevertheless, the twin principles ofEnergy were the desire to plan energy and the close and complex rela-tionships with producers (see Chapter 6).


The surprising thing about the DEn is the rapidity with which ittransformed itself from an interventionist, producer oriented, depart-ment into, in the words of one senior official, ‘something rather like afringe merchant bank. It had to develop lots of expertise in floatations,the structuring of industries for floatations.’ It switched from a depart-ment of nationalised industries to a department of privatisation andthe logic of this policy led to its reincorporation into the DTI.

The suggestion from ministers was that there was very little resis-tance to change. Lawson provides an explanation:

If you take, for example, a very old and strong and on the wholeself-confident department like the Home Office, then it is verymuch harder to change that culture than it is in a new departmentlike the Department of Energy. It was a Department which was newand very low in the Whitehall pecking order with no history and ithad been demoralised for various reasons. So I did not have asnearly as great a task as I would have had in a Home Office type ofdepartment.

Similarly, John Wakeham recalled that on his first day:

The under-secretary responsible for privatisation said to me, ‘Areyou serious about wanting to privatise the electricity industry’ and Isaid, ‘For Christ’s sake I thought that was what I had come here todo!’ and they said, ‘Well if you are going to do that then you aregoing to have to make some very difficult decisions in quick time.’

But, as Wakeham discovered: ‘I had some officials who were pretty wellwedded to the policy and who were determined to make it work andthey had certainly in me a man who had some idea about how toexecute it.’

However, it is important to recognise that even in this weak anduncertain department cultural change was slow. As one officialrecounts:

The government were quite sensible about the way in which itapproached privatisation. It started with the things which were small and clearly almost already conducting a commercialprivate sector business and moved on to things that were largeutilities.


It was once officials realised that the privatisation strategy placed themat the forefront of the government’s economic policy and thereforeincreased, temporarily, the status of the department, that they becomeenthused and the policy developed more rapidly.

The consequence of the privatisation policy, and Lawson’s shift to amarket-based energy policy, was that the department lost its raisond’être. Consequently it merged and therefore became inculcated withthe organisational culture of the DTI. One official now in the Energydivision of the DTI suggested that being a larger culture, there wasmuch less personal interaction and it was more difficult to know whatwas going on in the department. Other parts of the department(energy efficiency) were absorbed into the Department of theEnvironment and this made a significant difference because the coher-ence of the Energy culture was lost in a ‘large sort of federal organisa-tion which has strong fiefdoms … so it is more like a federalorganisation with local cultures than the Department of Energy’.

Conclusion

Culture has defined both the policy agenda and operations of depart-ments and, despite the strength of the Whitehall culture, departmentshave distinct sub-cultures which affect both how they operate and howthey frame policy objectives. In all four departments, the Conservativeadministration was successful in changing, to varying degrees, thepolicy culture. The DTI became less interventionist, the DSS aban-doned the precepts of Beveridge, Energy shifted from a policy based onplanning to one based on privatisation and marketisation. In theHome Office whilst there was some shift from social liberalism to anemphasis on law and order, the extent to which this has been acceptedby officials is still open to question.

There has also been important change in the organisational cultureof departments (see Fig 4.1). The impact of managerialism has changedthe way departments operate and the relationships that exist withinthe departments. The DSS and the Home Office have become less hier-archical, advice is being provided by wider sources and senior officialsare increasingly developing roles as managers. Consequently, theautonomy and impact of ministers are increasing, as we will see in alater chapter. However, it is still open to question whether this isindicative of a shift to a differentiated polity. Many traditional patternsof policy-making and ministerial/civil servant relations remain, as wewill see in later chapters.


Figure 4.1 Summary of cultural change in departments

Degree of Nature of Nature of Externalchange old culture ministers pressures

DTI Changed from Division between Number of Strong economicinterventionist trade and industry. New Right pressure for newto laissez-faire Uncertain in ministers policies and culture. 1980s. concerned to prime ministerial

impose pressure forlaissez-faire change of direction.policies.

Home Shift in policy Deeply embedded Until 1989 most Increasing pressureOffice from socially and relatively ministers agreed to deal with rising

liberal to socially uniformly with departmental crime but generallyconservative. accepted. agenda. From relatively isolated.Shift in culture 1989 socially still unclear. conservative.

Energy Shift from Relatively new With Wakeham Tremendous interventionist department and and Lawson changes in energy and planning to culture not ministers market as result of department of embedded. committed to miners’ strike, oil privatisation. privatisation. market, nuclear

issues.DSS Shift from Deeply embedded. Relatively High demographic,

universalism to ideological social andselective welfare. ministers economic pressure

concerned with for change in reducing costs welfare provision.of welfare. Government

commitment toreduce expenditure.

The comparative case-studies are useful in illuminating why the cul-tures changed in the way they did in the different departments. Thedepartments where there was the most rapid and dramatic change, DTIand Energy, were the departments which had the least embeddedculture, greatest external pressure and ministers with alternative ideo-logical frameworks to draw on in developing policy. The departmentwith the least and slowest change, the Home Office, had a stronglyembedded culture, relatively limited external pressure and, until thelate 1980s, an absence of ideological ministers. The Home Office had astrong commitment to running its own divisions and Thatcher was rel-atively willing to allow the department to be isolated from prime min-isterial and Cabinet oversight (see Chapter 6). Perhaps, crucially, noministers really tried to change the department. The most difficult caseis the DSS. Here, the department had a deeply embedded culture, but itchanged significantly. However, the change was slow. Two factors


seem to be important in explaining that change. One is the strength ofthe external constraints; there was great pressure on the DSS to controlcosts and this provided a strong incentive for both organisational andpolicy change. Second, both Fowler and Lilley worked with the depart-ment to change policy rather than attempt to impose a new directionon an unwilling Civil Service.

This chapter raises some important points about relationshipsbetween structures and agents. The behaviour of agents is affected bythe nature of departmental cultures, but they react to, and mayattempt to change, those cultures. Cultures operate on two levels: theyframe the policy decisions and shape the rules of the games in terms ofhow organisations operate and who is involved in decision-making.Because cultures are contested and open there is space for interpreta-tion which allows cultures to change. Significant changes in culture,however, require a combination of action and structure. Cultures willchange most easily if an agent has an alternative cultural or ideologicalframework on which to draw. However, change can also be facilitatedby the structural situation within which the agent is located. In thisway, a culture may be inherently weak or there may be strong externalpressures for change. Change is perhaps most likely where both factorscontribute to produce a significant space for the action of an agent.

5Departments and the CoreExecutive

In the past, discussions of the power of the Prime Minister normallycounterposed her/his power to that of the Cabinet and saw it verymuch as a zero-sum game. Indeed, even today, some authors focusalmost exclusively upon the Prime Minister and see British govern-ment as becoming increasingly presidential or even ‘Bonapartist’ (Foley1992; Pryce 1998, Hennessy 1998; Kavanagh and Seldon 1999).However, we follow Rhodes (1997), Smith (1999a) and others inarguing that we should conceptualise power in British central govern-ment in terms of a series of exchange relations between different ele-ments of the core executive. Of course, there are different definitions ofthe core executive and we do not intend to add to this debate (seeSmith 1999a). Rather, we shall focus upon our departments’ relationswith other key elements of the core executive: the Prime Minister andhis or her territory, notably the Prime Minister’s Office and the CabinetOffice; the Cabinet; the Treasury; and other departments.

Obviously, the role of the core executive is crucial to contemporarydebates about government. Rhodes’ differentiated polity model down-plays the power of the Prime Minister, emphasising that the core exec-utive is segmented and that the relationships between the various partsof that core executive, or rather between the people who fulfil particu-lar roles within it, involve an exchange of resources. In this chapter, weshall assess Rhodes’ contentions by examining departmental relationswith other parts of the core executive. However, the longest section ofthis chapter deals with the departments’ relations with the PrimeMinister for two reasons. First, we need to assess the extent and degreeof Prime Ministerial influence, an issue that is crucial to the debates ongovernance. Second, our study covers the entire tenure of MargaretThatcher, a Prime Minister who seemed to obsess both academics and

101


journalists. As such, an analysis of her role throws a great deal of lighton how far Prime Ministers are constrained by the resource dependen-cies with which they are faced; certainly the picture painted in muchof the literature is that Thatcher restructured the pattern of resourcedependencies so as to impose her ideas and policies.

Departments and the Prime Minister

As indicated, a great deal of literature emphasises Prime Ministerialdominance and sees the Prime Minister as bypassing Cabinet and usingministers as agents to implement policy. As such, the view is that thedegree of Prime Ministerial intervention in, and influence over, depart-ments reflects the wishes of the Prime Minister (for a summary of thesearguments, see Thomas 1998; for a critique, see Smith 1999a). To befair, this literature, in large part, reflects a broader literature arguingthat Thatcher dominated her government and, consequently, was thecentre of the policy-making process, of the core executive. In this vein,Hennessy argues that she created a ‘conviction Cabinet’ and reportsone Permanent Secretary’s view of her as ‘(the) most commandingPrime Minister of recent times’ (Hennessy 1986: 95).

We must be wary of this type of analysis. In the terms discussed inthe introduction to this book, these analyses privilege intentional andpolitical explanation (see Marsh 1996). Thatcher may have had a par-ticular, perhaps dominant, style, but all Prime Ministers havesignificant resources that they can use to affect outcomes. We need toacknowledge the importance of those structural resources, rather thanmerely focusing on how particular Prime Ministers use them.

As such, any analysis of the role of the Prime Minister in relation todepartments needs to acknowledge that, while the Prime Minister hasresources, so does the department. As such, there are organisationalconstraints on a Prime Minister. We also need to recognise that out-comes will be influenced by the effectiveness with which PrimeMinisters, ministers and departments utilise their resources. At thesame time, the outcome will be shaped by the broader economic, socialand political context within which the agents are operating.

Of course, a Prime Minister has considerable resources and thus,potentially, enormous power. The key resource a Prime Minister has islegitimacy/authority. The legitimacy of the British political system isrooted in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty (Judge 1993).However, the Prime Minister is conventionally the leader of the largest

Departments and the Core Executive 103

political party and the electoral system, which usually produces amajority government and tight party discipline, ensuring that theexecutive dominates the legislature and the Prime Minister exercisesauthority/leadership over the party, Parliament, government andCabinet. As such, there are at least two bases of the Prime Minister’slegitimacy; s/he is Prime Minister and party leader. This dual legiti-macy creates considerable scope for Prime Ministerial autonomy andaction. At the same time, a modern Prime Minister also has consider-able administrative support, particularly the Prime Minister’s Officeand the Cabinet Office; largely because of decisions taken by pastPrime Ministers. These administrative structures help him or her exer-cise authority. Thus, the paradox inherent in the position of BritishPrime Ministers is that a number of institutional/structural factorsmeans that the post is highly personalised; the Prime Minister as anindividual can have a considerable impact. This is not to say that theimpact of the Prime Minister depends solely or evenly mainly onpersonality.

The Prime Minister’s authority and this personalism is reflected inhis/her powers. Perhaps most significantly, s/he can change the struc-tures and relationships within Whitehall by, for example, creating orabolishing departments or pushing through fundamental changes tothe Civil Service. Almost as important, s/he makes ministerial appoint-ments, decides the membership and role of Cabinet committees andplays a significant role in the appointment process for senior civil ser-vants. In addition, her/his support for policy proposals is crucial; s/hecan almost definitely veto policy proposals and his/her support isessential if any minister wants to steer a controversial issue throughCabinet. As such, the Prime Minister has powers which gives him/herthe potential autonomy, or agency, to change the structures withinwhich government occurs, to change the agents who operate withindepartments and to affect ministers’ and departments’ strategic judge-ments on whether and how to bring forward a policy proposal. Theinitial part of this section will focus on the first, second and fourth ofthose powers; the Prime Minister’s role in the appointment of civil ser-vants is dealt with in Chapter 7. In each case we shall pay some atten-tion to how different Prime Ministers have used this power, an issue wereturn to later.

The Prime Minister’s power will be constrained by other features ofthe organisational, political, economic and social environment withinwhich s/he operates (Rose 2000). Indeed, the sheer volume of govern-ment business means that even a hyperactive Prime Minister like


Thatcher cannot intervene in more than a limited number of policyareas. For this reason, the impact of a Prime Minister will depend onfactors such as: the issue under discussion; the standing of the depart-ment involved; and a Prime Minister’s perception of the abilities of theminister concerned. These may be viewed as departmental resourcesand we shall focus on them, and how they are used by ministers, in thesecond part of this section.

As indicated earlier, we must also recognise that both the PrimeMinister and other ministers operate within a broader political andeconomic environment that constrains or facilitates their actions and,thus, affects outcomes. So, for example, a Prime Minister, and his/herministers, will always be concerned about electoral considerations,considering how particular policy decisions will play with the elec-torate. At the same time, both will be concerned about public opinionand, as we shall see below, particularly when considering the positionof Home Secretary, ministers, and the Prime Minister, may, on occa-sions respond directly to public opinion (see Chapter 8). Economicfactors or events can equally shape what policy is introduced and howministers and the Prime Minister interact. The whole saga of BlackWednesday and Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from the ERM in1992 presents ample evidence here. We shall deal with these con-straints in the third part of this section.

Finally, we need to acknowledge that different Prime Ministers mayview their role and exercise their powers in different ways. So, differentagents operating in the same structural context will not necessarilytake the same decisions or produce the same outcomes. We shall lookat this issue in the final part of this section.

Overall, our argument is that the relationship between the PrimeMinister and a department should not be viewed as one of dominanceand subservience, but is rather based upon an exchange of resources,within a broader economic, social and political context. Consequently,it is not a zero-sum game. Despite the Prime Minister’s Office accruingmore institutional resources since 1997, the relationship between thePrime Minister and the centre is still one of interdependence.

The Prime Minister’s powers

Changing the structure of government

The Prime Minister has considerable power over organisationalchanges in government. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, many Prime


Ministers have changed the structure of government. Thatcher, forinstance, was mainly responsible for initiating the drive towards gov-ernment efficiency in the 1980s, which led to significant changes inthe Civil Service (see Chapters 4 and 7). In 1979, she appointed SirDerek Rayner to promote efficiency and value for money in govern-ment and this led to the creation of the Efficiency Unit which workeddirectly to the Prime Minister. As a member of the Next Steps teamacknowledged:

She gave us political backing and that was very important. Sheessentially was our minister and we worked with the other ministersand with officials in departments and it wasn’t particularly easy forthem because we could come in and ask what I think most peopleregarded as rather tiresome questions. They were very good about itbut everyone knew that we had Mrs Thatcher’s backing and thatwas very important.

Likewise, Major built upon the reforms initiated by Thatcher and madeinstitutional reform a distinctive element of his administration. Manyelements of the Next Steps programme, such as increased accountabil-ity, better service delivery and greater responsiveness to the consumer,became central aspects of Major’s programme, the Citizen’s Charter.Once again, the Citizen’s Charter only had an impact because thePrime Minister placed his authority behind it. The idea for it camefrom the policy unit and it was opposed by the Treasury and by depart-ments. This time it was a minister, Francis Maude, who used the PrimeMinister’s authority to force departments into submission (Hogg andHill 1995).

Subsequently, Major used the newly created Office of Public Service,which gave him and his Deputy Prime Minister the administrativemachinery necessary for imposing reform on departments, to pushthrough the Senior Management Review.

The power of appointment

The Prime Minister appoints ministers and creates, and appointsmembers to, Cabinet committees. In doing so s/he is able to shape thecomposition and deliberations of the Cabinet. Certainly, one way thata Prime Minister can attempt to limit the autonomy of a department isto place a minister who is close to or highly dependent on him/her in


office. This tactic has been used on a number of occasions. One formerDeputy Secretary said:

I suppose Merlyn Rees was very much Jim Callaghan’s man.Callaghan had been Home Secretary and Jim had quite traditionalviews about policy in the Home Office sphere. Merlyn was not polit-ically strong enough nor intellectually inclined to strike out on adifferent path to Jim. And Jim’s concerns were to keep the kettlefrom boiling over.

Thatcher took a similar approach with David Waddington who wasthe first Conservative Home Secretary to enter the department in the1980s with any commitment to change and clearly had the support ofthe Prime Minister. Waddington believed that: ‘She obviously thoughtthat she was appointing “one of us” and she knew that I was slightlymore robust on issues of crime and punishment than Douglas (Hurd)had been.’ However, he recalls that Thatcher did not intervene inwhat he did:

There was no question of sitting around the table and deciding howI would approach the job. She just said: ‘I think you are the man forthe job, now get on and do it.’ I cannot remember a single wordthat night about how I should approach the job.

Although neither Prime Ministers told Rees or Waddington what to doin policy terms, each Prime Minister believed that the minister con-cerned could be trusted to follow Prime Minister-approved policies. Inthis vein, Waddington indicates that he felt that the key issues ofHome Office policy had already been determined before he started thejob. He was merely left with the job of piloting the Broadcasting Billthrough Parliament:

I was drafted on to the Broadcasting Cabinet Committee which waschaired by Margaret and I felt really as if I was lobby fodder andonly there to give the Prime Minister support.

Certainly, Mrs Thatcher used her control of the Cabinet committeesystem to get her way. As an example, Nigel Lawson admits that minis-ters were well aware of the Prime Minister’s favoured policies. She wouldcommunicate her views to the Chair of the relevant Cabinet committeeand, in Lawson’s view, ‘the Chair would then know the Prime Minister’sview and try very hard to push it through’. As such, the Prime Minister


could have considerable impact by her control of the Cabinet commit-tees. Of course, this is a tactic used by all Prime Ministers. So, forexample, one of our interviewees, Edmund Dell, a former Minister ofTrade, argued that Callaghan structured the Cabinet committee whichconsidered the Bullock Committee’s Report on Industrial Democracy, acommittee established under the terms of the Social Contract, to ensurethat any legislation which emerged was not radical.

The power of veto or support

The greatest and most consistent impact that a Prime Minister canhave on a department is actually negative. The Prime Minister canstop, or refuse to support, a policy development and it is probablyeasier to do this than to impose a policy on a minister or a department.Nigel Lawson argued:

The Prime Minister’s main power is the veto and that was the mainway in which the Prime Minister exercised her power. The PrimeMinister cannot force his/her proposals on a minister who is not pre-pared to go along with it but they have a very effective power of veto.No other individual has the power of veto, maybe a majority inCabinet can do so, but not any individual. If you cannot convince thePrime Minister the best you can do is ask them to restrain from castingthe veto and allow the proposal to be discussed in committee.

Second, the existence of Prime Ministerial veto power requires minis-ters to attempt to win his/her support. As Norman Tebbit suggested:

You did not want to get into the position where she had publiclycome down against what you wanted to do as that would havemade things difficult. If you thought you might have trouble withthe Prime Minister, you would have to start working early on andthink about how to change her mind. One might talk to WillieWhitelaw.

Certainly, the Prime Minister often has influence without interveningdirectly, because departments and ministers anticipate his or her pref-erences. As a former Cabinet Secretary argues, this process of ‘antici-pated reactions’:

tends to involve a shift within policy rather than a shift betweenpolicies. There’s nothing sinister about it, you still have the policy,


the broad lines of policy established reasonably rationally, as itwere, in inter-ministerial discussions. But … a minister in charge ofa department really quite likes to know if the Prime Minister takes adifferent view on a particular thing.

However, as another official pointed out, if the minister is strong andconfident, the Prime Minister may be less influential:

Kenneth Baker picked up, if you like, some random dropping fromMrs T. about education which she felt was not something withwhich he was comfortable. He would then talk it though with herand she didn’t always win in those discussions.

The same official suggested, ‘She was quite prepared to listen andchange her view, I think perhaps less so towards the end of her reign.’It is perhaps worth noting the use of ‘reign’ here.

Clearly then, the Prime Minister has considerable power at his/herdisposal. However, as we emphasised earlier, government is complexand no Prime Minister can oversee everything. In the past it was oftenargued that the Prime Minister was in a weak position in relation toCabinet ministers because s/he lacked administrative support.However, in the last three decades the creation of the Prime Minister’sOffice and the growth of the Cabinet Office have given the PrimeMinister not only much stronger administrative support but also amuch-enhanced policy-making capacity.

The Prime Minister’s Office is a relatively recent innovation; its exis-tence was first acknowledged in the Civil Service Yearbook, 1977. Initially,it merely provided administrative support to the Prime Minister, but nowit has assumed a more proactive policy role which means it has becomean increasingly important mechanism for enabling a Prime Minister tointervene in departments. The number of staff in the office increasedfrom 62 in 1972 to 100 in 1995 (Lee et al. 1998: 31; Kavanagh and Seldon1999). In addition, the Prime Minister has the support of the CabinetOffice. For example, Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary between 1980and 1997, played a significant role in developing policy and the unfold-ing events during the Thatcher administration (see Thatcher 1993: 395).While the growth of the Prime Minister’s Office has provided the PrimeMinister with a real policy-making capability, it has not ended his/herdependence on departments. Departments are still the core units withinwhich policy is developed and drafted and in which implementation isscrutinised.


Departmental resources and Prime Ministerial intervention

As emphasised earlier, it is crucial not to see Prime Ministerial power inpurely personal terms. Although Prime Ministers have authority andresources, they are constrained. The Prime Minister has a crucialimpact on the development of policy; departments have autonomyand are difficult to control. All departments have considerable auto-nomy because of the scale of government, but this autonomy variesover both time and space because Prime Ministers have the authorityto intervene. Hence, British government is based on the paradox ofPrime Ministerial authority and departmental autonomy. DespitePrime Ministerial wishes, departments control the policy process.

The Prime Minister has tremendous authority but lacks sufficientinstitutional mechanisms for detailed intervention in departmentalpolicy-making. At the same time, while the Prime Minister can affectpolicy, s/he is unable to monitor policy development within depart-ments, despite the growing roles of the Prime Minister’s Office and theCabinet Office. The Cabinet Office’s role is largely administrative, thePrime Minister’s Office is small and Prime Ministers are still dependenton departments and their senior ministers. So, Thatcher’s intervention-ism was not really based on any administrative machinery but on herpersonal drive and, thus, the degree of co-ordination depended to agreat extent on the hyperactivity of the Prime Minister. In effect, theposition of the Prime Minister is still too personalised to provide anysystematic process of co-ordination or central direction.

There is no single co-ordinating agency, with co-ordination dividedbetween the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’sOffice. This weakness at the centre is strongly reflected in Tony Blair’sdrive to establish greater co-ordination (Smith, Marsh and Richards2000). Blair has taken a number of measures, for example, increasingthe size of his political office and creating the role of a ‘Cabinetenforcer’, in order to increase the ability of the Prime Minister to co-ordinate the activities of the departments. Nevertheless, even atpresent the Prime Minister lacks an effective mechanism for interven-ing in departments.

The problem has been made even greater by the decline of theCabinet. The Cabinet was always the institution that had responsibilityfor the co-ordination of departments at the political level. However,whilst under Callaghan, for instance, the Cabinet played a central rolein crucial economic decisions such as the response to the IMF condi-tion, from Thatcher onwards Cabinet has generally been a rubberstamp. Indeed there was no discussion of economic policy in the first


year of the Thatcher government (Gilmour 1992). Increasingly, the keydecisions are made in Cabinet committees (which are in essence part ofthe Cabinet system), informal ministerial committees and in bilateralmeetings between ministers, or more likely, between the Prime Ministerand a particular minister (see Foster 1997). Consequently, the way thatPrime Ministers intervene in departments is of crucial importance.

Patterns of Prime Ministerial intervention

As the Prime Minister cannot be omnipotent or omnicompetent giventhe scale of modern government, then s/he makes decisions aboutwhere and when to intervene. Obviously, the autonomy of depart-ments varies across time and space, but there are some patterns. Whilesome departments, like the Treasury, the Home Office and the ForeignOffice always have status, they do not always have autonomy. Thelower profile, and perhaps more technical, a department is, the moreautonomy it will have; although of course this autonomy is likely to beover less important decisions. In addition, if a departmental policybecomes the centre of broader political debate, then its autonomy islikely to be reduced. If a department has a strong minister its auto-nomy is likely to be greater.

Rhodes (1995: 22–3) argues that: ‘Prime Ministerial control is strongin strategic defence, foreign affairs and major economic decisions, butgenuine cabinet or ministerial decision making predominates over allaspects of domestic policy’ (see also Dunleavy and Rhodes 1990). Thisis a common analysis of British government, based on a distinctionbetween high and low politics, what Bulpitt (1983) calls a ‘dual polity’model, in which the core executive is concerned with the heroic areasof politics leaving other issues to less important ministers and sub-central government. As a generalisation this may have some validity,but it needs to be treated sceptically. Certainly, our evidence suggeststhat Prime Ministers have not always been concerned about all areas ofhigh politics, neither have they been unconcerned about other areas.This point again leads back to the issue of personalism and mayexplain why so many commentators have been concerned with theissue of personality. For, whilst the Prime Minister is institutionallyconstrained, it is extremely difficult to establish a generalisable modelof patterns of intervention. What is clear is that whether a PrimeMinister intervenes depends on a range of variables including salience,external context, the status of colleagues, personal interest, the criticalnature of issues and the nature of the department and policy.


Thatcher is generally perceived as an interventionist Prime Minister.However, her policy involvement was highly erratic. Thatcher’s role inrelation to the Foreign Office provides an interesting example. Duringthe Falklands War, Thatcher effectively took over the daily conduct ofthe war. In her final years at least, she became obsessed with Europe;falling out publicly with her ex-Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe onthe issue. However, Lord Carrington, Foreign Secretary between 1979and 1981, argued in an interview that generally Thatcher: ‘did not paymuch attention to foreign affairs’.

Similarly, the Home Office, whilst accepting some elements of theThatcherite agenda, managed to retain a considerable degree of auto-nomy. In the words of one official, Thatcher had ‘basic instincts aboutcrime and punishment which were very different from WillyWhitelaw’s, but they never came through, as far as I can see, in his time.’

In this vein, Douglas Hurd recounts:

It was remarkable and surprising to me as she had passionate viewsabout broadcasting, but, if you leave that aside, on the other HomeOffice matters she had views but she did not believe that it wasprudent for her to seek to impose them. This was not characteristicof her in all departments; it certainly was not in the FCO later. Fromtime to time I would try to find out what her view was on some-thing I was going to do. A message would come back on to my desksaying that the Home Secretary should take a decision and, if hethought it important enough, should take it to the Cabinet. She hadviews on penal issues but knew these issues were very difficult anddid not therefore impose her views at all. She really kept clear to anextent that surprised me.

This independence was partly related to the nature of the departmentand partly related to the status and views of the various HomeSecretaries. As we saw in Chapter 4, there was little to distinguish thepolicy of the Home Office under different governments in the 1960s,1970s and 1980s. The Home Office is an insular and closed depart-ment with a strong culture that, through its status and professionalknowledge, has been able to exclude outsiders and, to some extent,resist Prime Ministerial intervention. This independence is increasedbecause Prime Ministers have been wary of the potential for HomeOffice matters to rapidly become highly politically salient anddifficult to control. As such, it is interesting that, whilst Thatcher hada personal economic adviser and a foreign affairs adviser, she never


had a home affairs adviser, although there was a member of thepolicy unit who had responsibility for home affairs amongst otherthings (Lee et al. 1998).

Of course, departmental autonomy is even greater for some minis-ters. Thatcher was highly dependent on Whitelaw in the early 1980sbecause she was in an ideological minority in the Cabinet and neededthe support of Whitelaw, the Deputy Prime Minister. His loyalty wasimportant in ensuring Thatcher retained the support of the Cabinet. AsThatcher put it (1993: 27):

Willie is a big man in character as well as physically. He wanted thesuccess of the government which from the first he accepted wouldbe guided by my general philosophy. Once he had pledged hisloyalty, he never withdrew it. He supported me steadfastly when Iwas right and, more important, when I wasn’t.

Thatcher’s dependence on Whitelaw gave him considerable autonomyas Home Secretary. As a former Permanent Secretary in the HomeOffice observed:

Willy Whitelaw was the most powerful minister in the governmentafter the Prime Minister, that gave the department a great deal ofautonomy and the scope to use that high degree of autonomy …Thatcher had to pay a price in terms of refraining from an attemptto mould, influence and shape Home Office policy-making for aslong as Whitelaw was there.

However, even Whitelaw made concessions to her on issues aboutwhich she felt very strongly. As a former Deputy Secretary observed,although Whitelaw opposed an emphasis on the ‘short, sharp, shock’in relation to penal policy, he went along with it, arguing: ‘we mustput through this popular policy because it is politically necessary, butshow that we warned them.’

The relationship between Thatcher and the DEn is also interesting.One former Energy official, who later worked closely with Thatcher,made an important, if slightly disingenuous, point: ‘I don’t think shewas any more interested in energy than in other subjects that weregoing to be important.’ As far as it goes this seems accurate, but itneglects the fact that, particularly in her first two terms, Thatcher wasvery concerned with what she saw as the dangerous power of the NUMand she chaired the committee created to deal with the 1983 miners’


strike (Thatcher 1993: 346). Almost without exception, all the DEncivil servants we interviewed commented upon the extent ofThatcher’s involvement, many describing it as an obsession.

In addition, after the 1983 election, privatisation became theflagship policy and the DEn was the key department, with the Treasurypiloting this policy. Once again, this meant that Thatcher was cruciallyinterested in discussions within, and policy produced by, the depart-ment. So, throughout her term in office, the DEn, which mostobservers might class as a small and relatively unimportant depart-ment, was crucially involved in ‘high politics’.

However, even in the area of energy, Thatcher allowed some minis-ters more autonomy than others. A comparison between the DEn rela-tionship with the Prime Minister under David Howell (1979–81) andNigel Lawson (1981–3) is illuminating. David Howell emphasised thatthere was ‘constant interference’ from Number 10. Indeed, he sug-gested that he had little influence over policy because his civil servantswere talking directly to Thatcher’s office:

You could find your position sold out already because a PermanentSecretary or Under Secretary had had a meeting and had done adeal, not so much behind your back but under your feet. By thetime it got to ministerial level, sometimes the policy had been soldout and sometimes it hadn’t.

To an extent, Howell’s view was reflected in the fact that most of the civil servants who worked with him saw him as a less thaneffective minister. Nigel Lawson’s status both in the department andwith the Prime Minister was much higher. We shall see in the nextchapter that he was highly regarded by DEn civil servants as both anintellect and a powerful force in Cabinet. Consequently, Lawsonpointed out that at Energy: ‘I had complete autonomy to work outproposals.’

If the Prime Minister has faith in a Cabinet minister, that ministerhas considerable autonomy to develop policy and the Prime Minister,unless it is an area of particular interest or salience, will have very littleinput. So, under John Major, Peter Lilley conducted a thorough over-haul of social security policy almost completely away from the eyes ofthe Prime Minister and almost solely in-house. Thatcher probably wasexceptional in that she intervened in more policy areas than mostPrime Ministers, but even she was greatly constrained by the scale ofgovernment and thus left trusted ministers alone.


It is also important to emphasise, as Lawson astutely notes in hismemoirs (1992: 129), that strong bilateral relationships between a min-ister and the Prime Minister can benefit both:

Most Cabinet ministers, particularly after a longish period in gov-ernment, tend to be preoccupied with fighting their own battles andpursuing the issues that matter within their own bailiwick, and loseinterest in the wider picture. Most of the time it is comforting forthem to feel that all they need to do is strike a deal with the PrimeMinister, and not have to bother overmuch about persuading theirother colleagues.

As such, he understood, and was good at, the politics of Cabinet.Thatcher felt she could rely on him to do a good job and, in return,was willing to support him in Cabinet.

Rhodes is surely right that Prime Ministers are less likely to be con-cerned about departments which are less politically visible and wherecomplex technical issues predominate. This is clearly true of muchpolicy in both the DTI and the DSS. As one DSS official, with a fairlyjaundiced view of Thatcher, explained:

The danger with Margaret Thatcher was she did think she kneweverything. And she did believe she was right; so that on social secu-rity she would dredge back to her knowledge when she was in theDepartment and she would make announcements or pronounce-ments, on something or other, and usually get it wrong. But itdidn’t bother us much.

In this official’s view, in the early 1980s the department had littlecontact with the Prime Minister and she had little impact on thedepartment. But there were areas where she would have an input.Patrick Jenkin, Secretary of State between 1979 and 1981, revealed howThatcher forced through a particular policy change to withdraw socialsecurity benefits from strikers:

I found myself saying that, until we get the negotiations goingthrough, then I’m afraid (we have to pay) and she just said, ‘I don’tcare. We are not having benefits paid out to strikers.’


Sometimes, autonomy is not a result of status but reflects the fact thata minister has his/her own power base in the party. Peter Walker repre-sents an interesting case from the Thatcher years. Although his viewswere at odds with Thatcher on many policy issues, he had a highdegree of autonomy because he was not dependent on her.Consequently, despite Thatcher’s dislike of his views, Walker was leftalone. He claimed:

She and I had a rather strange relationship but she knew that I wassafer in than out and I knew that and so I basically did what Iwanted in my departments. If she had said to me: ‘I want to priva-tise this or that industry’, I would have gladly left because I wasnot pining for office. She knew that. The fact is that I was in astronger position with her than others because she wanted me tostay in the Cabinet and she knew I was not someone who wouldplead for office and would have happily left. I was independent ofher and, therefore, I had a stronger position than somebody whowas a keen supporter of all she was standing for who was hopingto please her.

Walker suggested that, when he went to the Welsh Office, Thatcheragreed to give him ‘enthusiastic backing’ and, consequently, he coulddo ‘whatever I wanted in Wales’. Subsequently, when the Treasury saidhe could not: ‘I said “fair enough I’ll go to No. 10” and she kept herpart of the deal.’

Of course, relations between individual ministers and the PrimeMinister can change in part because the pattern of dependencechanges. Roy Jenkins offers an example:

In the first term I was very pleased to be the Home Secretary, inthe second term I was very reluctant to be in that government atall. On the other hand, in the second government the PrimeMinister was more eager to keep me in the government than I wasto stay in. So, vis-à-vis the Prime Minister, my power was enor-mously greater in the second government. I was really very doubt-ful the second time and as a result I had absolutely nil DowningStreet interference.

Key ministers may not only have more autonomy, but they may also actmore broadly as brokers. So, Willy Whitelaw, and later John Wakeham,


were very important conduits between departmental ministers and thePrime Minister. According to Norman Tebbit:

People would come into Willy for help with dealing with number 10and equally number 10, faced with wanting to carry something con-troversial through, would entrust it to Willy to take it through.

Similarly, Patrick Jenkin pointed out that Whitelaw was in a positionin which he could say to Thatcher: ‘“Prime Minister I think you haveto accept that your colleagues are not with you on this.” She didn’t likeit but she had to accept it.’ However, he might also say to ministers onother occasions: ‘Look, I realise that most of us do not agree with herbut on an issue like this she is entitled to have her way, so belt up.’ ForJenkin: ‘He was an enormous strength to her but often he would waitand be the last to sum up before the Prime Minister and he would say,“Prime Minister there is a considerable majority in the Cabinet who arenot happy with this’’ and she accepted that.’

The affect of the political, economic and social context

In our view, any debate about the relative powers of the Prime Ministerand his/her ministers needs to acknowledge that both, as agents, areconstrained by past policy decisions, existing institutional structuresand the political and economic context within which they operate.Both the Prime Minister and ministers are constrained by the institu-tional and cultural setting in which they operate.

Consequently, the factors leading to Prime Ministerial interventionare many and complex. Nevertheless, the three key variables we needto consider are the authority of ministers and the Prime Minister, theinstitutions of government and the structural context resulting fromexogenous political, social and economic factors. Thus, the FalklandsWar and the miners’ strike demonstrate how the Prime Minister islikely to intervene in a time of crisis. But Prime Ministers will be con-strained by the existing institutional structure provided by depart-ments, existing programmes and the capabilities of the core (see Rose1990; Rose and Davies 1994). The Prime Minister is also likely tobecome involved when conflicts between departments spin out ofcontrol. The Westland Affair provides an excellent example. Here, theconflicts between the Ministry of Defence and the DTI dragged thePrime Minister into detailed control of the issue to the extent that allstatements concerning the affair had to be cleared by Number 10;


thus providing Michael Heseltine with a reason to resign (seeDunleavy 1995).

A more usual example concerns the argument between theDepartment of Employment and the DSS over who should haveresponsibility for the Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA). As Seldon (1997:409) acknowledges, the announcement of this policy by Peter Lilley‘led to a long and acrimonious battle between Lilley and Shepard’sEmployment Department over which department should oversee it’. Asan official in the DSS pointed out, the aim of the policy was to unify acomplex process of paying and delivering benefits and the aim was tohave a ‘single benefit’. However, neither of the two departmentsresponsible for the delivery of the benefit could agree on who shouldtake the lead. In the end, only the Prime Minister had the authority toresolve the dispute as neither department would defer to the other. Asthe official stated:

There is no one like the Prime Minister to do that sometimes; resolv-ing areas where you simply reach an impasse. The Prime Minister isuniquely placed to impose a solution and this is what John Majordid with the JSA. Whether it was the best solution is not really thepoint. Once it had been made everyone worked and made itsucceed. Whether or not it is the right decision, it is one that every-one will accept.

Again this illustrates how the particular authority of the Prime Ministerimpacts on the operation of departments.

The Prime Minister’s use of resources

The personalism of British central government means that the inter-vention of the Prime Minister is not structured or systematic; itdepends on the choices that the Prime Minister makes, as well as thenature of the department and the relationships that exist between thePrime Minister and the minister. According to Merlyn Rees, Callaghanwas content to leave decisions to Cabinet and Cabinet committee.However, Callaghan himself argued that he kept a clear oversight ofdepartmental ministers:

I invited (….) ministers to come and see me individually andwithout their officials, to tell me about their work. We sat infor-mally in the study at No. 10 and I put to all of them two basic ques-tions. What were they aiming to do in the Department? What was


stopping them? I prepared for these chats by asking BernardDonoughue and his Policy Unit, in conjunction with my PrivateOffice, to prepare an overview of each Department’s activities beforeI saw the minister … (Callaghan 1987: 408)

Callaghan’s aim was to find out what was going on in departments,rather than imposing his views. However, he did initiate a debate onthe direction of educational policy and persuaded Shirley Williams, theEducation Secretary, to include the idea of a core curriculum in herGreen Paper (Callaghan 1987). Similarly, at the time of the IMF crisis,Callaghan also dominated the discussion and direction of economicpolicy. According to Donoughue (1987: 8):

The Chancellor wanted the approval of his Prime Minister and col-leagues in order to spread the responsibility collectively. He alsoneeded the Prime Minister to lead and deliver the support of otherministers … Therefore, in these crises, the Chancellor needed thePrime Minister to rally such colleagues behind him and this in turngave the Prime Minister an enhanced opportunity to intervene.

A comparison between Thatcher and Major is also revealing. Thatcherwas reasonably well-briefed on policy developments in departments.Indeed, in Norman Tebbit’s view, ‘(Thatcher) had an alarming amountof knowledge. It was not that she did not know the facts but that shewould come to different conclusions about the facts.’ As such, LordYoung argued that Thatcher had an ‘enormous’ impact: ‘I used to be infear and trembling when I went to see her as she somehow knew moreabout my Department than I did! She worked incredibly hard and hadan incredible capacity for detail. It was very difficult to get anythingover her, very difficult.’ Similarly, Patrick Jenkin argued that, comparedto Heath, Thatcher had ‘a much larger impact’ on policy developmentwithin the DHSS.

In contrast, Major’s approach was much more collegial and, com-pared to Thatcher, he was much less willing to impose himself on hiscolleagues (Seldon 1997: 207–10). Obviously, this owed something tohis less assertive personality, but we must beware of an explanationthat focuses exclusively on agency. His leadership style also reflectedhis weaker position in a Conservative Party that was increasinglydivided on Europe and other issues. As McAnulla argues (1999), part ofthe legacy Mrs Thatcher bequeathed John Major was a level of discon-tent that significantly constrained his room for manoeuvre. However,


we must also be wary of portraying Major as indecisive and non-inter-ventionist. As a former Cabinet Secretary emphasised:

Any Prime Minister, if she or he wishes to exert influence, can do so.You can either do it publicly like Mr Major has been doing with MrsShepard just recently or you can do it behind the scenes.

The key point is that all Prime Ministers can, on occasions, by-passdepartments. Thatcher may have been notorious for making publicstatements, without consultation, which would then have to beadopted by departments, but such practices also occurred during theMajor administration. A DSS official offered one example:

It has happened in this [the Major] government with relation to thepoorer pensioners package. You get an announcement in the budgetthat pensioners will get an extra £20. That was just announcedbefore we were consulted.

So, different Prime Ministers may operate with different conceptions oftheir roles. However, all intervene on occasions and none can inter-vene all the time. Even Thatcher, viewed by some as the supreme inter-ventionist was often so preoccupied with a limited set of issues thatelsewhere the extent and depth of her reach was limited. One civilservant who spent three years in her Private Office summed up thispoint very well:

If I think back to my time in her office, in the first year, 1981, wemainly dealt with the rampant recession and the management ofthe economy; managing the political debate on all that. And, ofcourse, there was the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ problem. The second year wasdominated by the Falklands War and, during the several months inwhich the war was fought, she didn’t do any domestic business atall. The third year was mainly about winning the election.

The departments and the Treasury

Obviously, the Treasury looms very heavily upon a department’shorizon; although much more on some than others. Most depart-mental policy initiatives involve expenditure and the Treasury’s major concern remains effective control over public expenditure.Consequently, it is the Treasury that has the most consistent and


systematic impact on departments. All departments are effectively con-strained by the Treasury. To a great extent, the impact has often beennegative – stopping new initiatives. Nevertheless, it is clear that, inrecent years, and in relation to some departments, the Treasury hasbecome more involved in the policy-making process.

As we observed in the introduction, the Treasury is the one depart-ment that has been well researched. In particular, the work of Deakinand Parry (2000), which was also funded under the ESRC WhitehallProgramme, looks at the changes that have occurred in the Treasury’srelations with departments in the 1990s. Their focus is upon socialpolicy, so they examine the Treasury–department relationships insocial security, health, housing, education and the territories (Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland). As such, they only focus on one of ourdepartments, Social Security, but their results are both interesting andconfirm our own impressions, although in a more systematic way thanwe could achieve in our multi-purpose study.

One of Deakin and Parry’s (2001: 181) conclusions is particularly rel-evant to our concerns:

The main theme we encountered was the centrality of social secu-rity, because of its scale (£100bn a year) and the recent history ofrather poor relations between the Treasury and the Department ofSocial Security. At the heart of these relations were problems aboutestimating the cost of social security benefits, a demand-led itemnot subject to cash limits. In the mid-1990s overspends were of alarge enough magnitude (hundreds of millions of pounds) to knocka hole in public expenditure aggregates. The Treasury’s response wasto turn on the main cash-limited item, running costs, and demandthat it be cut unless agreed policy savings were found. The DSS felthurt by the way that this linkage was made and by the generallycombative style of Treasury ministers and officials.

This observation is interesting for two reasons. First, it emphasises thepoint that we need to disaggregate the relationship between theTreasury and different departments. Obviously, the Treasury is moreinvolved with a high-spending department; so its links with the DSSare very different in scale and importance than those with a low spend-ing department like the Home Office. Second, there is inevitably acompetitive element in the relationship; it is not always a zero-sumgame, but there are occasions on which it is so.


The most interesting aspect of Deakin and Parry’s work is the waythey show how the significant reorganisation in the public expenditureprocess that has occurred since 1993 has affected Treasury–departmentrelations. They argue that two changes have proved particularly impor-tant. First, a new top-down budgeting approach was introduced in1993. Now, the Public Expenditure Committee of the Cabinet, chairedby the Chancellor, is responsible for deciding departmental expendi-ture plans. Deakin and Parry argue that this has given the Treasurymore control over aggregate patterns of expenditure and has enabledthem to be more relaxed about detail:

Our research emphasises the way this has worked in the Treasury’sfavour by concentrating information in their hands: spending minis-ters appear before the Committee, but the only officials present arethe Treasury’s and they also brief the members playing an umpirerole. The Committee gave the Treasury a greater assurance thataggregate expenditure would not slip out of control through cumula-tive pressure from spending ministers, and so allowed them to bemore relaxed about letting go of detail. (Deakin and Parry 2000: 162)

Second, the appointment of a new Permanent Secretary, Sir TerryBurns, in 1991, together with the Fundamental Expenditure Review(FER), which the Treasury, like all Whitehall departments, had toundertake in 1993, led to important changes in the way the Treasuryworked (on the FER see Chapman 1997, Ch. 3). The result of theTreasury’s FER was that a quarter of its senior management posts wereremoved and responsibility for expenditure control was shifted downthe hierarchy. As such, the Treasury followed the pattern we have seenin our departments; there was delayering and Grades 5 and 7 becamemuch more important in the policy process.

Third, and more recently, the Treasury has increased its control ofdepartment expenditure through the new regime for public expendi-ture. Now the main aggregate indicator of expenditure is the TotalManaged Expenditure within which departmental expenditure limitsare set for three years. Consequently, the Treasury has longer-termcontrol over the spending patterns of departments and their policydevelopments.

As Deakin and Parry argue, given its increased control over theprocess of setting aggregate expenditure patterns, the intention is thatthe Treasury ‘(renounces) detailed controls in order to free up space for


strategic thought’. However, this change hasn’t been universally wel-comed by departments who are concerned that the Treasury willbecome too involved in policy-making. Again, Deakin and Parry makethe point: ‘there was, for instance, reluctance among many of ourrespondents to concede that the Treasury could play the role of proac-tive advocate on certain types of social spending in order to improveeconomic performance, as recommended by the Treasury (FER)’. TheTreasury now has spending teams, headed by a Grade 5, responsible foreach expenditure area. In each department, the key contact is still thePrincipal Finance Officer. Of course, the main responsibility of theseteams is for expenditure. However, inevitably their brief involvespolicy, given the focus that the Treasury has upon improving eco-nomic performance. Once again, the DSS offers an excellent exampleof how this works. As Deakin and Parry argue (2000: 143) ‘After the1997 election the Treasury and the DSS formed something of an axiswithin government because of a shared ministerial agenda of targetingand means-testing.’

The Treasury’s involvement in this policy area thus resulted from atleast two factors. First, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and his closeassociate Harriet Harman, Labour’s first Secretary of State for SocialSecurity, were both committed to a policy change which was at thecore of the Labour government’s pledge to reform the welfare state. Inthe Treasury’s view, the New Deal, which was the flagship policy inthis area, would contribute to a more skilled and flexible workforceand, thus, to improving economic efficiency. Second, this policy wasfunded from the public utilities windfall tax and that also gave theTreasury a key concern in this policy area.

There is little doubt then that the Treasury is now crucially involvedin labour market policy, most specifically in the welfare to work pro-gramme. Indeed, it has established a Work Incentives and PolicyAnalysis Unit and there are regular meetings between the teamsresponsible for this policy area in the Treasury, the DSS and theDepartment for Education and Employment. Of course, this in partreflects the Labour government’s emphasis on joined-up government,but it also shows that when that policy area impacts upon its concern,the Treasury is much more pro-active in policy terms than it use to be(Smith, Marsh and Richards 2000)

However, the Treasury has not been as involved in other areas ofsocial policy, let alone in other areas of policy. Deakin and Parry (2000:162) make the crucial point:


In social policy areas delivering services rather than cash, there wasmuch less of a Treasury wish to go beyond financial frameworks intothe detail of policy. In health, the Treasury sought to apply a generalpressure on costs through efficiency savings and the use of privatefinance. In education, the approach of the Treasury team seemed tobe based on defining priority areas within which the Treasury’s supplyside brief could be promoted-vocationally-relevant training, the edu-cation infrastructure. In housing, spending ministers were seen ashaving an old-fashioned attachment to housing provision as a socialservice which the Treasury sought to question.

The main point is that the role of the Treasury has changed over the1990s and this change has probably been accelerated by the change ingovernment. The Treasury is more involved in some areas of policy-making than in the past, but in social policy and beyond it has beenincreasingly involved in those areas that impinge on its central role inpromoting the government’s economic policies. Nevertheless, whatcomes out of a lot of interviews is the limited way that the Treasuryimpinges in the day-to-day working of the majority of officials (inother words those that are not Principal Finance Officers). The degreeof this isolation from the Treasury is indicated by an official in the DSS:

The PES round generates policy development and that clearly is anarea where you have contact with the Treasury. Our contact withthe Treasury is usually through our finance department and werarely have direct contact with the Treasury in connection with thePES because there are handling tactics and the rest of it which aredeveloped centrally by our finance department

However, as the same official pointed out: ‘I am currently takingforward a review of child support as part of the department’s CSR. TheTreasury are represented on the steering committee of that study.’ Sowhilst on a day-to-day basis the involvement of the Treasury may beminimal, when it comes to major policy change with financial implica-tions the Treasury will be involved. This in a sense fits the findings ofDeakin and Parry (2000: 203) who stress:

We have been struck by the impact of personalities on the attitudesheld by the Treasury and the way it relates to other departments.What we detected were a linked series of micro-social networks,


based upon the Treasury team leader and departmental PrincipalFinance Officers.

Relations between departments

Departments are key actors in the core executive territory. As such, itwould be wrong to concentrate upon the relationships between thedepartment and other parts of the core executive and ignore the rela-tions between departments. Of course, each department has relationswith most others and we could not, for reasons of both space andknowledge, analyse all these relationships. Rather, we want to focus onwhat seems to us to be a major issue: in large part because of theincreased complexity and interconnectedness of government, depart-ments interact with one another more than in the past. This processhas come more into focus recently with the Labour government’s stric-tures upon the need for joined-up government, but, in our view, this isa response to a significant, long-term problem.

A number of important points emerge from our research concerninginter-departmentalism. The picture derived from many insideraccounts is of a Whitehall in a continual process of interdepartmentalbattles and turf wars (see Crossman 1975; Castle 1980; Ponting 1986).Whilst the Westland Affair and the Scott Report demonstrate that thisis clearly the case, it provides only a partial view based on the excep-tional rather than the day-to-day. One DTI official pointed out how,for instance, on most issues concerning trade policy, the DTI and FCOwere in agreement. However, he continued:

difficulties arise when the Foreign Office have a particular politicalor strategic objective and they see trade policy as a useful instru-ment or lever to use to achieve it. This occurred over debates abouta North Atlantic Free Trade Area where the Foreign Office weremore inclined to promote the idea of bilateral trade arrangements,preferential trade arrangements, discriminatory trade arrange-ments than we were. In fact we weren’t inclined to do anything ofthe kind but they were keen on it because they could see politicalgames and deals with Mexico or South Africa … There was realtension there and we had long and protracted debates about freeand free-er trade …

For most senior civil servants their work is generally isolated fromother departments except where there are very clear overlaps or where


a new policy development is likely to impact on another department.So the DTI being an economic department has close contact with theTreasury and as regards to export licences there are formal contactswith Defence and the Foreign Office. There is also an interdepartmen-tal committee on trade policy ‘which is open to any other departmentwhich is interested (but) it doesn’t meet at fixed times, it meets ad hocwhen required to’. But apart from this, contact between departmentstended to be specific rather than general and informal rather thaninstitutionalised. According to one retired Grade 2: ‘One knew peoplein other departments, and one used to ring them up or go to see them,or have an informal meeting.’ However, another former DeputySecretary said she had little contact with other departments: ‘becausemost of what I had been doing was rather self-contained with the DTIcompetition policy, I don’t remember much interchange with otherdepartments.’ A contemporary Grade 2 said: ‘I don’t have much experi-ence of operating outside my own field.’ One former Grade 2 in theDTI summarised the situation well:

It would depend on the nature of the policy. If it is a policy whichdoesn’t cut across the interests and aims of other parts of Whitehallsignificantly then you can afford to do it internally and not troubleothers. But if it is going to have a major impact in another area, wellit behoves you to build them into the process.

A DSS official told a similar story of erratic interdepartmental relations:

There are increasing links with the DFEE due to the introduction ofthe JSA. When I was on housing benefit I had links withEnvironment but the links were pretty tenuous … We have somelinks with the Lord Chancellor’s Department but they are fairlytenuous. We have links with Health over things like the child’sname on the birth certificate so we have some links but they are notreally day-to-day links.

Perhaps surprisingly, even within departments there can be a lack ofcommunication. Many officials talk of policy chimneys where policy isdeveloped within a particular section without regard to wider policyissues or other parts of the department. Particularly within the HomeOffice there could be a very rigid distinction between the divisions. Wesaw in Chapter 4 that there was little integration of the various


divisions within Energy. Even in more integrated departments such asthe DTI, there could be problems as one Grade 2 intimated:

The lousy thing that David Young did which we tried to persuadehim not to do was to abolish any cross departmental committee atsenior level to talk about strategy. We were allowed to talk aboutmoney and resources and we have recently as part of a senior man-agement review created a senior management group but we lost thatas I think a number of junior ministers, Francis Maude, in particu-lar, were worried about officials going around and sewing things upand screwing him up by deciding what the strategy should be andthen presenting the minister with a fait acompli. I think that wasmore the way the mind worked than reality.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to paint a picture of isolation and completely enclosed silos. One Grade 2 in the DTI spoke of con-tinual informal networks within departments, saying that on EUissues in particular ‘everybody knows everybody’. A former DTIPermanent Secretary pointed to fortnightly meetings of all deputysecretaries and gave an example of how the division concerned withtrade policy and the section concerned with trade promotion wouldwork closely on issues concerned with South East Asia, say, but it wasinformal, rather than organisational contact. Indeed in all depart-ments formal contact was only Grade 2 level through weekly or fort-nightly meetings. There was little formal, day-to-day contact withindepartments, illustrating that contact was on the basis of personalnetworks which are necessarily haphazard. So according to one Grade 7:

It’s largely informal networks, I mean the horizontal linkages arepretty poor. It’s not helped by the buildings. We in this buildingare in the Department of Trade effectively, the people in 1 VictoriaStreet are an amalgam of the old Department of Energy, RegionalPolicy, Regulation and Insurance. The Department of Industry arein Buckingham Palace Road. So we can live in isolation, we candevelop our isolation, because we have no real contact with ourcolleagues.

A very senior DTI official summed up the ad hoc and inchoate nature ofintra-departmental co-operation:


There are informal networks, you get meetings of people who havebeen selected for the fast stream … or you get people who are part-timers who band together. They talk about their common experi-ences and interests. This is very informal … No doubt there arenetworks that are even more informal, just groups of people whojoined at the same time or met on a course or used to worktogether in a division, that sort of thing. There are formal groupsas well that are put together for dealing with particular issues, thecomputerisation of the department and the computer user groupor we have sports and social organisations which lay on a series ofevents and run facilities. There are things of various kinds andthere are business committees starting with my meetings with thedirector generals and meetings in other configurations. We havethe departmental management group and a thing called thedepartmental strategy group which meets regularly and hasdirector generals in it.

What is striking is the absence of formal structures of integrationbelow the DG/Grade 2 level. Networks are informal and by-productsof other relationships rather than institutions. This highlights boththe importance of personalism throughout the structure of the coreexecutive – policy-making relationships often depend on individualdecisions – and the difficulty of applying network theory to inter- andintradepartmental relationships. The networks within Whitehall arenot structured in the sense outlined by Marsh and Rhodes (1992a)because they are fluid and unstable, depending to some extent onpersonal relationships and often formed quickly and temporarilyaround particular relationships. However, they are structured byculture and rules of the game; in a sense everyone is an insider andtherefore there are important elements of trust in place which allowthe rapid creation of networks when necessary. Networks may beneeded for political (i.e. gaining support of other colleagues or depart-ments) or practical (i.e. needing the legitimacy, knowledge oradministrative machinery or another department) reasons, butnonetheless, they are relationships of dependence.

Finally, the generally accepted picture of Whitehall derived fromhalf-readings of the Fulton Report is of an amateurish, generalists’ CivilService, unable to develop any specialisms because people are continu-ally moving around. The reality is that apart from a few ‘high-flyers’most civil servants spend their careers in one department and some-times even in one section of a department. This can be true even of


Permanent Secretaries. One Principal Establishment Officer illustratedthe lack of mobility:

The theory is that (with changes dues to the SMR) there will be a lotmore interchange between departments. In reality there was nevermuch anyway. As you differentiate departments by their cultures,management structures, IT, networking and all the rest, actually youare not making barriers but you are making it more difficult and it isstill true that people build their careers within departments. Nowone of the problems is that you just about have zero movement inthe department and therefore you are not creating the vacancieswhich allow you to advertise for outside people or people fromother departments … Just about every move in this department isclosely engineered.

Departments do interact with one another in a number of ways. Wehave already dealt briefly with the Cabinet as a forum within whichissues that cross-cut departmental interests can be discussed andresolved. However, in most cases, departments have a vested interest inresolving issues earlier in the policy-making process. For that reason,each department will have some informal contacts with most otherdepartments when it appears that a policy may impact on anotherdepartment (it is an important rule of the game). Often, these willessentially involve a series of telephone conversations between the civilservants in two departments who are most involved in some issuewhich cross-cuts departmental responsibilities. At other times the issuewill be of sufficient, and most likely recurrent, importance to warrantthe creation of a committee which draws upon officials from all thedepartments involved. It is in this context that many, if not most,issues are resolved.

Nevertheless, the present Labour government has emphasised theproblems that occur from the absence of adequate machinery to dealwith issues which cross-cut departmental responsibilities. The argumentwhich underpins this view is that departments operate as ‘chimneys’;that informal processes of the type sketched out above are insufficientto overcome such departmentalism and, thus, produce more effectivepolicy-making. This commitment to joined-up government has led tocreation of co-ordinating units within government, notably the SocialExclusion Unit and the Women’s Unit, both now located in theCabinet Office, with which departments have to interact (for detail see


Smith, Marsh and Richards 2000). There is certainly no doubt that theadministrative framework with which departments are faced is morecomplex than in the past.

The emphasis upon joined-up government has also encourageddepartments to co-operate more on issues of common concern. To befair, this trend has also been accentuated by the change in the role ofthe Treasury identified in the last section. So, in a number of social andlabour market policy areas the Treasury has become a key actor in apolicy-making process which has brought departments together todevelop and agree a workable policy.

One example of departmental co-operation is the relationshipbetween the DSS (previously DHSS) and the DFEE (formerly Departmentof Employment). Obviously, this relationship has always existed, giventhat the level of benefits will affect the level of employment, and vice-versa. However, the extent of contacts fluctuated depending on the par-ticular policies being pursued by government. So, one of ourrespondents who worked in the DHSS in the 1960s and 1970s arguedthat a significant increase in contacts and consultation resulted from theintroduction of the Earnings Related Supplement in 1978.

Nevertheless, the current civil servants we interviewed in both theDSS and the DFEE agreed that more recently it was the introductionof the JSA in 1996 that encouraged the two departments to workmore closely together. As we saw earlier, there was initial conflictbetween the two departments about who should lead on the policythat was only resolved in Cabinet. However, once the legislation wasintroduced it was clear that it could not be implemented withoutclose contact and co-operation between the two departments. Assuch, an interdepartmental committee was established and a numberof our interest group respondents emphasised that it is now com-monplace to see civil servants from the two departments sitting nextto one another at a meeting. Indeed, at least two respondents empha-sised that ‘it is difficult now to spot which civil servants are fromwhat department’.

On our evidence, such interdepartmental consultation, in this areaas in many others, has been growing in large part because theincreased complexity of legislation means that more issues cross-cutdepartmental responsibilities. However, this process has also been rein-forced by the increased role of the Treasury in policy-making in somefields and the Labour government’s commitment to joined-up govern-ment. So, in the welfare-to-work area we identified a fairly tight triad


based on co-operation between the Treasury, the DSS and the DFEE.The civil servants involved, mainly Grades 5 and 7, met regularly, dis-cussed a broad variety of issues and shared a general commitment to acommon policy. There appeared little evidence of inter-departmentaltension and all were signed up to the government’s labour marketpolicy. Indeed, the major concern of the civil servants involved seemedto be with devising and perfecting ways of measuring effective policydelivery.

Conclusions

The key concern of this chapter has been the role of departments inthe core executive of British politics. In part, our aim has been to arguethat departments are and will remain an important part of the coreexecutive. Clearly, the Prime Minister has significant powers and anincreased capacity, given the role of both the Prime Minister’s Officeand the Cabinet Office, to co-ordinate government policy. However,we must also acknowledge that departments control most of the policyprocess and officials within departments have the time, expertise andnetworks to develop and, to some extent, implement policy. Inaddition, the Prime Minister is unable to intervene throughoutWhitehall because of the scale of government. So whilst PrimeMinisters may intervene more now than in the past, on the whole thatintervention is not systematic, but depends on where the PrimeMinister chooses to invest energy and resources. Paradoxically, thePrime Minister has the ability to intervene almost where she/hechooses but does not have the ability to control everything that goeson in government. Consequently, it is difficult to make generalisationsabout patterns of Prime Ministerial intervention.

The second important conclusion of this chapter is that despite thepopular vision of interdepartmental movement, conflict and co-opera-tion, officials below Grades 1 and 2 are often relatively isolated. Again,the process of inter- and intradepartmental relations is based on thestrange combination of personalism and structural failure. Networksexist to some extent because of personal interactions; they are notfacilitated by institutions. However, there are clear rules concerningthe creation of formal interdepartmental networks.

Third, whilst departments are to some degree isolated and operatingwithin their own cultural worlds, the department that does to somedegree co-ordinate and affect them all is the Treasury. The structures ofdependence feeding to the Treasury mean that the Treasury can have a


significant impact on what departments do. Whilst, in the past, thiseffect has largely been negative, the work of Deakin and Parry high-lights how it is increasingly becoming positive, with the Treasurydeveloping distinct policy preferences that are wider than their eco-nomic remit.

However, given our position on the structure/agency problem out-lined in the introduction, we would argue that any actor, whether thePrime Minister or another minister, has autonomy. The actions of aparticular Prime Minister cannot be read off from knowledge of theresources he or she has and of the structural context within which s/heoperates. Various Prime Ministers and ministers have different concep-tions of their roles and different abilities. So, individuals clearly affectoutcomes. Indeed, as we have seen, Thatcher was generally viewed asan interventionist Prime Minister who shaped a great deal of govern-ment policy. Nevertheless, even Thatcher could only shape a limitedamount of policy and we must beware of being carried away by therhetoric of ‘Thatcherism’. In the next chapter we examine the impactof ministers on departments.

132

6Reassessing the Role ofDepartmental Cabinet Ministers

The centrality of departments to the policy process means that depart-mental ministers also have considerable importance. As we saw inChapter 4, ministers can have an impact on departments and thereforethe way their role changes and develops is significant in understandingthe operation of the core executive. In this chapter, we examine therole of Cabinet ministers and how it has changed in the last 25 years.The chapter examines the multiple roles and varying impacts of minis-ters. One of our key aims in this chapter is to address some of thebroader questions raised in the introduction about the nature of con-temporary governance, the extent to which individual ministers makea difference in policy terms and the effect of ideas on any changeswhich occur in the role of ministers.

First, however, we need to establish whether there has been a changein the roles that ministers perform in the last 25 years. Consequently,we begin by presenting a classification of ministerial roles before usingthis classification to examine these changes. Subsequently, we assessthe extent to which any changes represent a significant change in thepattern of governance. Finally, we attempt to explain the changes,drawing on the theoretical discussions in the introductory chapter.

A changing role for ministers?

Classifying ministerial roles

In our view, there are four generic roles that ministers perform, witheach complementing the others: a policy role; a political role; a man-agerial or executive role; and a public relations role. Each of these cate-gories can be further subdivided (see Figure 6.1). These generic roles are

Reassessing the Role of Departmental Cabinet Ministers 133

Figure 6.1 Ministers’ roles

Policy Political Executive or Publicmanagerial relations

Agenda setting Advocacy of Departmental Overseeing department’s management department’s position in relations with:Cabinet

Policy initiation Parliament Executive decision 1. interest groupsmaker 2. public

3. mediaPolicy selection European UnionPolicylegitimation Party

interrelated and not mutually exclusive. So, if a minister is to be pro-active in his or her policy-making role, s/he will need to perform man-agerial or executive functions; for example, deciding on the extent ofintradepartmental and interdepartmental discussions and interestgroup consultation. Subsequently, the minister needs to steer thepolicy through Cabinet and Parliament, perhaps, at the same time,playing a public relations role, convincing the electorate of the benefitsof a particular policy.

The policy role

Headey (1974: 71) identifies three types of policy roles: the policy ini-tiator, the policy selector and the policy legitimator or minimalist. Incontrast, Norton (2000) distinguishes between commanders, managers,agents and team players, although such an approach conflates thepolicy and the managerial roles. We suggest that it is useful to subdi-vide Headey’s policy initiator role because, while many ministersattempt to initiate in narrow policy areas, there are some, althoughvery few, who try to change a department’s broader policy agenda; thelatter we term agenda setters. We look at each of these categories inturn, although paying most attention to agenda setters.

Agenda setters. In our four departments there were a number of minis-ters who intended to change the broad agenda or policy line of thedepartments. Two of these were Labour ministers: Roy Jenkins whoinstigated change in the Home Office and Tony Benn who failed inattempts to change the policy agenda in the DTI and DEn. We identify


a number of ministers who, during the Conservative years, were com-mitted to fairly fundamental change: Michael Howard, who hadsignificant influence on the Home Office; Nigel Lawson, who had acrucial effect on the DEn; David Young, who changed the DTI; PeterLilley, who influenced the DSS; and Keith Joseph, who failed to havemuch effect on the DTI. A comparison between those who were suc-cessful and those who failed is particularly instructive.

As we saw in Chapter 4, Roy Jenkins effectively shifted the HomeOffice away from an agenda of social conservatism to one of social lib-eralism. As he explained in an interview:

I had a very clear programme and saw my role as opening up anumber of windows in the stuffy atmosphere of the Home Office.This was not overly difficult to do. A lot of Home Office officialswere very eager to respond to a new liberal wind blowing in. I felt itwas time for a change … and I did not find it that difficult to shiftHome Office opinion. (See also Jenkins 1991: 179–85)

A now retired Permanent Secretary from the Home Office witnessed,first-hand, the effect Jenkins had on the Home Office:

In 1966, Jenkins had a very large, very immediate, profound andlasting impact on the selection of people in the Home Office andthe ability to convey and permanently register his view and aims inphilosophical as well as purely policy terms. His influence wentboth deep and wide.

Chapter 4 highlighted how most ministers accepted the establishedHome Office agenda until Michael Howard. He explicitly wished toremove the department’s liberal bias. He outlined his agenda:

The Home Office clearly thought that the problems they faced wereintractable and there was nothing to be done about such issues asrising crime. I thought you could do something about crime. I delib-erately set out to change the system so that it gave the police a fairerchance of bringing criminals to book and also by encouraging thecourts to imprison those criminals responsible for a disproportion-ate amount of crime. I was trying to change things and thereforehad quite strongly developed views on the direction in which Iwished to go.


Many, if not most, of the Home Office civil servants did not like Howard;indeed only Tony Benn provoked similar responses from our inter-viewees. However, they recognised that he influenced the department’sagenda. A senior civil servant, no longer in the department, argued:

Michael Howard wanted a department that provided a good service,was responsive and had the right people in post who would do whathe wanted. He picked up the criminal justice system and moved itfrom here to there; he was proactive. Instead of saying to the public‘We are ahead of you, we know what the right values are, we knowthe beliefs you should have’, he said ‘We know you are frightened ofcrime, we know you want us to act’. He made it very political. Thisshocked the officials and they found it a break with the past when aHome Secretary treated law and order in a political way.

Howard’s colleagues also saw him as an agenda setter. So, KennethBaker argues that, although David Waddington, Home Secretarybetween 1988 and 1990, made some strong speeches on law and order,they ‘were never followed through in terms of policy (because) he wasoverwhelmed by the Strangeways prison riots’. As such, he contendsthat Howard’s illiberal, perhaps populist, law and order policy ‘(did)not accord with the policy of previous Home Secretaries’.

Nigel Lawson effected wholesale change in the Department ofEnergy’s agenda. In his view, the free market should determineBritain’s energy policy and he used his earlier experience as TreasurySecretary to help force an agenda change in the department. Thesuccess of Lawson’s approach, with its emphasis on privatisation andthe gradual erosion of the department’s commitments in the energyfield, eventually led to the department’s demise in 1992. He argued:

My belief was that what was needed in the energy field was to applyeconomic principles, which included privatisation, and the marketapproach. It wasn’t difficult because the Energy officials lacked theTreasury’s self-confidence and were not really capable of the samedegree of sustained argument and really a meeting with them wouldbe very much shorter. They would put forward a proposal and youwould shoot it down. They would be sullen but well mannered andthen they would rather ruefully accept what you were trying to do.(See also Lawson 1992: 162–70)

Lawson was almost universally admired by the DEn civil servants weinterviewed. One ex-Grade 2 argued: ‘the most formidable Secretary of


State was Lawson. He was formidable and influential; part of it wasintellectual and part stemmed from his political skill.’ Similarly, an ex-Permanent Secretary argued that Nigel Lawson was the crucial drivingforce behind the privatisations introduced by the DEn. His civil ser-vants produce briefs and then met Lawson to discuss them. As thesame civil servant said: ‘these policy meetings were the highest point ofmy time in the Department. They were great fun and everyone enjoyedthem.’ The civil servants liked the period because Lawson had weightin Cabinet and the department became much more important withinWhitehall. Many of the privatisations occurred after Lawson’s time, butour civil servants were agreed that it was he who set the agenda.

The change in the DTI agenda only occurred with Lord Young in 1988.Indeed, the DTI had a range of ministers in the 1980s who were free mar-keteers, but they did little to undermine the essentially interventionistethos on the Industry side of the department. Young, who had been aspecial adviser in the department between 1980 and 1982, argued:

I think there was resistance. Officials would come to me and say,‘David, this is all very well but after the next election all this isgoing to get changed back so we can’t let things get changed toomuch’, because we had this period of trying to go one way and thenthe other. It was only after the 1983 victory with a majority of 140and the disintegration of Labour that officials began to realise thatthis was a way of life and things started to accelerate.

In addition, Young was a determined ideologue. As he put it:

I’m an ideologue and I came in with a clear idea. Now it would bewrong to say I had it all wrapped up and I knew what I wanted todo but I did have general principles. Peter Carrington, and a numberof subsequent ministers, particularly in the last six years of govern-ment just liked the job and carried on. I went into politics, notbecause I wanted to be in politics but because we wanted to institutechange. (See also Young 1990: 249–50)

The civil servants shared the view that Young had significantlychanged the department’s agenda. As one Permanent Secretary arguedin 1998: ‘It wasn’t until Lord Young that the overall direction of policychanged. In public and overt terms we still use the logo that heinvented, we still have his ideas.’


Not all agenda-setting ministers have an agenda when they takeoffice. So, although Peter Lilley changed the agenda of the Departmentof Social Security, he admitted:

I certainly didn’t have a conscious agenda before I started. I neverdevoted much of my ambition to becoming Secretary of State forSocial Security or anticipated becoming that. So I had never workedout my thoughts in detail. I had my prejudices and principles,which I applied, but only gradually, as I got to know the form. Andcertainly I assumed that my instincts were different than those ofthe Department or of the direction in which it had gone for the pre-vious 50 years.

For Peter Lilley, the new agenda change was worked out over a five-year period and was not opposed by his civil servants; indeed, it was acollaborative effort. He spent an unusually long time as Secretary ofState and was therefore able to work through his own agenda forchange. One ex-Permanent Secretary acknowledged that, during his 35 years in the department, there had been 18 Secretaries of State, eachserving on average for less than two years. In this context, Lilley wasunusual and the same civil servant claimed: ‘He was in the Departmentfor a long time and became very expert and influential.’ This was acommon theme in our interviews. A serving Grade 2 claimed: ‘I wouldsay Peter Lilley was very much in charge of the agenda here.’

As we argued earlier, it is also instructive to look at ministers whotried to change a departmental agenda but failed. The example of KeithJoseph, like that of Tony Benn discussed in Chapter 2, indicates someof the factors which strongly affect a minister’s chances of achievingsuch change. In 1979, Keith Joseph was appointed Secretary of State forIndustry. He was confronted by a highly interventionist Whitehalldepartment. His intention was to introduce a new laissez-faire agendaand he even distributed the works of Hayek and Friedman to hisofficials in order to demonstrate his commitment to a new approach.However, despite the opportunity provided by the perceived failure ofthe interventionist policies of the Wilson and Callaghan administra-tions and the election victory, Joseph had little success in changing thedepartment’s prevailing world-view. In the words of one official: ‘KeithJoseph didn’t throw (interventionist policies) out of the door straight-away, he was willing to examine with us, very carefully, what we weredoing, why we were spending this money and what effect it was likelyto have.’ Despite his ideological preferences, he was unable or unwill-


ing radically to change the policy direction of the department. AsKenneth Baker argued:

Keith Joseph had a much greater intellect than either David Youngor myself. But that made him indecisive. He could see both sides ofthe problem and could be seduced intellectually, as was the casewhen he was in Education as well. (See also Baker 1993: 161–2)

It is interesting to contrast the fortunes of Joseph and Young. Bothjoined a department in which the industry section had a bias towardsindustrial intervention; both were operating under similar ideologicaland economic pressures for change and both consciously desired a newdirection in industrial policy. Yet Joseph was frustrated. He becameSecretary of State at a time when there was economic pressure tochange the direction of the department, there was clear ideologicalpressure from the Prime Minister and Joseph desired change. However,partly because of his personality, and partly because of the externalpressures he faced, in terms of rising unemployment, recession and thedemands of interest groups, he failed radically to change the depart-ment. Of course, it must be acknowledged that Joseph was the first toattempt to change the department and, consequently, was more con-strained by its institutional and cultural structures. Indeed, one formersenior Industry official, perhaps unwittingly, indicated the importanceof the departmental line to civil servants when he revealed:

Keith Joseph had very strong views about industry … but he wouldlisten to the briefing on a particular issue, which was painful anddifficult for him, and he would go through it and have a thoroughdiscussion with officials, and let us say he was persuaded in the endby the official argument.

Lord Young was able to oversee a change in the policy orientation of thedepartment. However, this change cannot simply be read off from his ide-ological preferences. It was partly the result of a long process of changethat was initiated by Joseph but also a result of demoralised and an out-of-sync department having to adjust to a new set of economic ideas. Bychanging its focus the department was better able to survive.

It is also important to note that in three of our four departments suc-cessful, agenda-setting post-1979 did not occur instantly but ratherover a number of years (see Figure 6.2). Moreover, the successfulagenda setters often built upon initiatives introduced by others. So, forexample, in the case of the DSS, Norman Fowler’s welfare review (1986)


Figure 6.2 Agenda setting

Department Agenda setter Agenda changeStage 1 Stage 2

Department of Norman Fowler Peter Lilley Questioning the (Health and) Social (1981–7) (1992–7) BeveridgeSecurity settlement and

universalism

Department of Keith Joseph David Young Shift fromTrade and (1979–81) (1987–9) interventionismIndustry

Home Office David Michael Move to socialWaddington Howard conservatism(1988–99) (1993–7)

attempted to change the department’s attachment to Beveridge, but itwas the piecemeal approach of Lilley in the 1990s that altered the waythe department viewed welfare. Similarly, in the Home Office, DavidWaddington tried to shift the department towards a more socially con-servative outlook, but events overwhelmed him and it was MichaelHoward’s period in office that altered the mind-set of the department.Finally, in the DTI, Keith Joseph tried, but failed, to alter the depart-ment’s interventionist orientation. It was David Young who institutedchange, reducing intervention and stressing enterprise. In all thesecases it could be argued that there were two stages in the agenda-setting process.

One other issue deserves comment before we move on. Our evidenceillustrates that the Thatcherite project affected various areas of policy atdifferent times. In Industry, the impact occurred early on, althoughmore generally for the whole of the DTI the policy change occurred inthe mid-1980s. In the DSS and the Home Office, it was the Major admin-istration that fully implemented the policy changes initiated during theThatcher era (Ludlam and Smith 1996). As such, any attempt to assess aThatcher or Major effect needs to be disaggregated across policy areas(Marsh and Rhodes 1992b; Dolowitz et al. 1996).

Policy initiators. Some ministers do not aim to change the overalldirection of the department, but attempt particular policy initiatives.For example, Patrick Jenkin admitted:

I was a mandarin’s minister. I remember that, when I first went intothe Department of Energy … I met a group of civil servants. They


said: ‘Patrick we can’t tell you how encouraging it is that, for thefirst time, we have a minister who takes the papers away, readsthem, comes in the next morning, discusses them and makes a deci-sion.’ I said, ‘But that is what you are supposed to do isn’t it?’ Andthey said ‘Yes, but you’re the first we’ve had for a long time.’

Jenkin was not concerned with challenging the agenda of the DHSS. Thedominant view of most of his officials was, as one official put it: ‘therewas continuity there, although the parties changed, the policy didn’t’.Nevertheless, although Jenkin was generally a mandarin’s minister, hewas also prepared to initiate policy against the advice of his civil ser-vants, as he did when he abolished the earnings limit for pensioners.

Policy selectors. A number of ministers in our departments were contentto play the role of policy selectors: choosing from the alternatives set outby officials. Merlyn Rees said he had ‘not a word’ of an agenda when hebecame Home Secretary in 1976. Douglas Hurd admitted:

Despite having experience of the Home Office as a junior ministerin the early 1980s, when I was appointed Home Secretary I saw myrole much more as managing the Department and keeping an eyeopen for any potential crisis looming on the horizon, rather thanintroducing my own social agenda on law and order. In my time, Iensured the Home Office was a fairly transparent Department inwhich to work, as I was most concerned to consult widely and heedthe views of my senior officials.

Similarly, Kenneth Baker, whilst suggesting that he did have an agendawhen he went into departments, admitted: ‘Any Home Secretary isbound to have less of an agenda as he soon realises that there is not agreat deal you can change.’ He also suggested that one area where hedid have a particular agenda involved prison reform: ‘which was fullysupported by the Woolf Report which the Prison Department in theHome Office also favoured’ (see also Baker 1993: 458). Effectively,Baker’s main policy concern was one that dovetailed with the HomeOffice’s existing view.

Policy legitimators/minimalists. Headey (1974) argues that some minis-ters can be minimalists, who, at most, merely legitimise departmentalpolicy; unfortunately, he provides no examples in that category. In ourfour departments there were a number of ministers who had almost no


impact. However, in most cases this was because they were in officeonly briefly or were overwhelmed by events. For example, whilst PeterLilley significantly changed the agenda of the DSS, his short tenure atthe DTI left no discernible legacy. John Moore, despite a rhetoricpromising ‘big ideas’ on the reform of welfare policy, was overwhelmedby the task and quickly removed. Lord Carrington and Patrick Jenkinadmitted that when they were put into the new Department of Energy,they were so overwhelmed by an energy crisis that there was little, ifanything, they could do (see Carrington 1988: 262–3). As Jenkin recalls:

We never had a remote chance because we were fighting a fourfoldrise in the cost of oil and a national coal strike. We hoped at onepoint it might have been a three-day week and I had to go down tothe House and explain why it couldn’t be. I mean one was justabsolutely up to one’s ears.

Carrington’s recollection was graphic: ‘We were living in a war.’Similarly, David Waddington argued that he was constrained by boththe lack of time and the impact of the Strangeways riots on the depart-ment in his time at the Home Office. Consequently, he made littleimpact on the direction of the department:

I wasn’t really there long enough to bring about major change and,particularly, with all the problems we had in prisons and theStrangeways affair, one did tend to be absolutely overwhelmed byevents as they unfolded. There wasn’t really a lot of chance to bringabout radical change even if one had wanted to do so. But thenagain, we did just begin … it was when I was at the Home Officethat we were shaping up to big decisions about introducing theprivate sector in to the running of prisons but the actual decisionswere not being made.

Political roles

The vast majority of senior civil servants will claim that the two keycharacteristics they want in a minister are decisiveness and politicaljudgement. In our view, there are four aspects of a minister’s politicalrole, involving dealing with the Cabinet, Parliament, Europe, and theParty.

The minister and the Cabinet. As one senior civil servant said to us: ‘YesMinister, while very funny, has a lot to answer for.’ Its caricature of theminister/civil servant relationship suggests that it is a zero-sum game;as with all caricatures this representation is tendentious. The two need


one another. Civil servants provide information and advice, ministersprovide political judgement and political skills to ensure departmentalpolicy initiatives are approved by Cabinet and legitimated byParliament. Political judgement is crucial in a minister. As onePermanent Secretary argued: ‘a good political sense is what we need ina minister because we don’t have it’. Another past Home OfficePermanent Secretary put it more graphically:

A minister needs an ability to see trouble coming … he also needsthe ability to perceive that there are considerations other than thosethat appeal to the readers of the Sun. Capital punishment and cor-poral punishment are two cases in point; there is not the slightestevidence at all that either acts as a deterrent, but the ordinary manon the Clapham bus believes that there is.

At the same time, a department can draft policy, but it cannot ensure itwill become law; it needs a strong minister to gain approval for its ini-tiatives. A minister who cannot win in Cabinet is a liability. So, as arecent example, the DTI was glad to get Peter Mandelson as theSecretary of State, if only briefly, and a number of civil servantsreferred to him as their first ‘heavy hitter’ in Cabinet since DavidYoung and Michael Heseltine.

Ministers in Parliament. Civil servants often link performance inCabinet with performance in Parliament. Of course, a great deal ofCivil Service time is spent writing briefs for ministers for their perfor-mances upon the floor of the House of Commons (debates and particu-larly question time) or before Select Committees. To civil servants,outstanding performances in the House of Commons strengthen theminister, and thus the department, in Cabinet. As one retiredPermanent Secretary argued: ‘we wanted to win in Cabinet … and(needed) a minister who was good in the House of Commons’.

Not surprisingly, our interviews with senior civil servants are litteredwith judgements of ministers based upon this criterion; a few illustratethe point:

• ‘Patrick Jenkin was marvellous in Cabinet and was very good in theHouse of Commons.’

• ‘Mrs Castle was a very good minister … She was a very effectivespeaker, a very effective Cabinet person and very good inParliament.’

• ‘Paul Channon really didn’t have the weight in Cabinet to followhis two predecessors and his performance in the House was poor.’


Ministers and Europe. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 9,Europe looms larger in the life of all Cabinet ministers than it did twodecades ago, but much more in the life of some than others. So, theForeign Office, the Treasury, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries andFood and Customs and Excise have been intimately involved sinceBritain first joined. Other departments, including the Home Office, andparticularly the DTI, have gradually increased their involvement overtime.

As such, Europe is very important for some departments. As onesenior official in the DTI put it:

There is no division in the DTI which is not, in some way oranother, involved with Europe … Even the personnel side deals withsecondments… Probably I think we have the biggest involvementwith Europe of any department because we are much bigger thanMAFF. A higher proportion of MAFF policy is subject to the EU butthey are a small department.

A minister’s performance in the European arena has become anincreasingly important aspect of the job and one by which s/he isjudged by the department.

Ministers and the Party. The Party looms large in the vision of minis-ters, but less so in that of the department. So, the minister is con-cerned about his/her standing within the Party, because that may becrucial for future job prospects. For that reason, a proportion of aminister’s time is taken up on Party business: attending the PartyConference, addressing other Party gatherings and dealing with theParty in the constituency. For most ministers this takes up a limitedamount of time, although it is, to an extent, concentrated at particu-lar times of the year and periods of the electoral cycle. Nevertheless,the department often begrudges this time, even if they understandthat politics is likely to be at least as high on a minister’s agenda asgovernment.

However, increasingly, the major way in which Party impinges on adepartment is through the role of special advisers. The number ofspecial advisers has fluctuated but there is no doubt that it hasincreased significantly over the last two decades; perhaps mostsignificantly since the election of the Labour government in 1997 (seeKavanagh and Seldon 1999). Advisers tend to be of two types: policyadvisers or public relations experts; in the current jargon ‘policy-


wonks’ or ‘spin-doctors’. Both types of advisers can cause tensionwithin departments, but the pattern is not uniform. So, one Treasurycivil servant argued:

There is quite a lot of resistance (to special advisers). Certainly forthe first 6–9 months (of the Labour government) officials were heardto say: ‘this will soon settle down and go back to normal’. But ofcourse it never has. I think officials have increasingly understoodthat this is how it is going to be.

In contrast, a DSS Grade 5 claimed:

I’ve never seen the current special adviser, which is some indication.I think the current adviser is a detail man, more than a spin-doctor.The first lot of ministers had two advisers who were both into spin-ning rather than anything else. We had a fair degree of contact withthem, which was fine. However, I think one of the advisers stirredup a lot of mistrust with the minister.

Of course, not all ministers have, or like, special advisers. So, one DTIminister asserted:

I’m not all that keen on special advisers if I’m honest. I’m all forpeer review but I don’t think we make enough of our officials. Theyare very bright people and they certainly want to help and be partof transforming public administration … but in a sense they arebeing sidelined … they are now really there to (assess) radical sug-gestions coming from outside the Department.

A current special adviser in the DTI offers a more critical view from the‘other side’:

I remember when I was a civil servant I hated special advisers… Ithink that the officials don’t like advisers attending meetings withministers and contributing, but what they hate most is advisersgetting involved in the Department lower down. That is exactlywhat we have done to try to shape the way that policies are comingup by talking to more junior officials in order to see who is workingon areas in which the minister is interested.

The pattern is complex and evolving, but clearly a minister with (a)special adviser(s) has to ensure that the relationship between the


adviser(s) and the department is co-operative rather than competitive;this is an important new role for ministers.

Executive and public relations roles

Headey saw executive and ambassadorial ministers as distinct types.However, ministers have little choice but to combine the executive andpublic relations roles with the policy role. Indeed, both Lawson andYoung saw managerial decisions as being crucial for the wider policygoals. Lawson believed personnel management was crucial to achiev-ing policy goals:

In the Treasury, I tried to promote the right people. That is veryimportant as you must get the right people into the key posts,people who at least understand what you are driving at …Promoting the ablest of the younger civil servants is an indispens-able part of getting the changes which are necessary.

Young focused on the structure of the department. He established aunit to review the work of the department and he curtailed regionalaid and ended sponsorship. He replaced the traditional goals of thedepartment with a new set of principles based on advising rather thandirecting industry.

However, as Hennessy (1989: 608) points out, most ministers do notsee their primary role as chief executives of departments (that is thePermanent Secretary’s function). Heseltine was a rare exception as aminister with a strong interest in management:

Heseltine was, in both senses of the word, a Whitehall freak. He wasfascinated by the machine, avid to trim it and supercharge it. I canthink of no other politician who would devote, as Heseltine did, thefirst two chapters of his political testament to the subject. (Hennessy1989: 607)

Moreover, one very senior ex-civil servant compared the contrastingapproaches of Michael Heseltine, William Whitelaw and John Nott:

Michael Heseltine was undoubtedly very interested in managementreform and very keen on it. Other ministers at the Home Office,such as Whitelaw, regarded it as their duty to be the politicalmanager of policy. Whitelaw saw his duty as to be sensitive to the


political dimensions of policy and to concentrate on that. He didnot want to consult about the management of the job. He did notfeel he would have anything by way of experience to offer. WhenJohn Nott was at the MoD he took very much the same view asWhitelaw. He was not against management change, but he thoughthe had many other things to do.

Young and Heseltine also saw public relations as central to their widerpolicy goals. Heseltine focused, to some extent, on relations inside andoutside the department. He wanted officials to feel part of the depart-ment and, therefore, was concerned with informing all levels of thedepartment about changes he was introducing. Indeed, he even madean internal video explaining the changes he wished to introduce andthe whole department took one afternoon to watch the video, whichwas followed by a question and answer feed-back session. However,this initiative did not have the impact Heseltine hoped. The broad con-sensus among DTI officials was that the video format, in whichHeseltine (a mild sufferer of dyslexia) rather stiffly read from anautocue, was a trifle embarrassing. Similarly, Young paid a great deal ofattention to publicising the role of the department to the generalpublic. He used intensive television advertising, in which the DTI wasportrayed as the Department of Enterprise.

As we shall see at more length in Chapter 8, most ministers are alsocrucially concerned with their media and public image. Of course,some ministers are more conscious and responsive to the media and, aswe shall see below, the extent to which departments are in the publiceye varies enormously, with the Home Office being the departmentwhich receives most attention. However, the key point here is that theimpact that the media has on ministers today, compared to 25 yearsago, is much greater.

If we take Headey as our benchmark it seems that the role of minis-ters has changed in four main ways:

• Ministers have a much more important role in policy-making thanthat claimed for them by Headey.

• The public relations role of ministers has become increasinglycentral.

• The political role of ministers has become more complex because ofthe increase of special advisers, whose relationship with the depart-ments is often difficult.


• Relations with Europe are of great significance, especially in adepartment like the DTI.

The first of these conclusions needs a little elaboration here; the otherconclusions are dealt with at more length elsewhere in the book.

For Headey, ministers often lacked policy objectives. He argued:

Given that politicians are not qualified and civil servants are notmotivated to act as policy initiators, it is not surprising that special-ists in different policy areas find evidence of lack of innovation andreluctance on the part of post-war British governments to reordertheir priorities. (headey 1974: 271).

In contrast, our research suggests that most ministers want and adoptsome policy role and that they have a greater policy role now than pre-viously. The latter is a conclusion which reinforces other literature onWhitehall which contends that ministers are increasingly proactive(Campbell and Wilson 1995; Foster and Plowden 1996; Richards 1997).As one Permanent Secretary put it: ‘there has been a major change inWhitehall. Our job now increasingly involves doing what ministerswant much more directly.’ Certainly, as we saw, our interviews indicatethat a number of ministers in the last Conservative administrationattempted to change the agenda of their departments. They wereanxious to be pro-active and have a lasting effect on their departments;in our terms they were agenda setters.

A changing pattern of governance?

How do these changes in the role of ministers relate to the argu-ments concerning the changing pattern of governance in Britain? Atfirst sight they seem to cast considerable doubt upon some of theclaims of Rhodes’ differentiated polity model. Certainly, theysuggest that ministers have assumed a more proactive role and, tothis extent, that there is more, rather than less, power concentratedin the core executive. At the same time, on the basis of suchfindings, some might contend the balance of power between civilservants and ministers has shifted, with ministers becoming increas-ingly dominant.

The main thrust of our interviews confirmed that the relationshipbetween ministers and civil servants/departments is, as Rhodes empha-


sises, an exchange relationship. Departments want strong ministers,capable of defending their interests within Whitehall and beyond.Ministers need good civil servants, capable of giving sophisticatedadvice, drafting good policy documents and legislation and imple-menting policy effectively. However, the terms of the exchange are notequal or constant.

Ministers are agents with very significant resources. Only they havethe authority to make policy and a department with a weak ministercan achieve little or nothing. In addition, as we argue at more lengthin Chapter 7, civil servants are trained to, and most wish to, carrythrough government policy; this view of their role is still strongly heldby civil servants. As such, they expect ministers to make policy; indeedthey admire strong ministers with a policy agenda which they can getthrough Cabinet. Of course, not all ministers want to adopt, or arecapable of adopting, such a pro-active role. We shall return to thatissue in the next section. However, here we want to make two pointsthat throw light on the governance debate and reinforce similar pointsmade in other chapters.

First, while Rhodes is right to emphasise that the relationshipsinvolved in the core executive are exchange relationships, the exactnature of those exchanges are dependent on the skills, values andinterpretations of those occupying those roles. The personality of someministers may push them towards a relatively inactive ministerial role.Others may feel too constrained by a departmental culture to innovate.However, ministers, and to a lesser extent civil servants, clearly domake a difference. Second, the nature of the exchange is also affectedby the broader context. So, for example, if a government, like theThatcher government, is informed by a view that civil servants are toopowerful, then this view is likely to affect how ministers conceptualisethe nature of the exchange between themselves and civil servants.

Explaining the change

Here we return to the two theoretical issues discussed in the introduc-tion and ask two questions: How important were individual ministersin reinterpreting and changing their role? To what extent did ideasdrive institutional change?

Did ministers make a difference?

Clearly, some ministers, but not all, do make a difference, but they areconstrained by the structural context in which they operate; we need


to recognise both points. Two aspects of a minister’s structural positionconstrains/facilitates him/her: his/her organisational position; and thebroader social, economic and political context. However, differentministers in the same structural position do not operate in the sameway; rather, agents interpret and attempt to negotiate constraints inthe light of their own interests and abilities. What is more, this is aniterative process, given that the behaviour of an agent can change thesubsequent structural context in which s/he is located.

Ministers as agents

Perhaps the first point to recognise is that ministers have multipleroles. They are not totally department-centred, often seeing depart-ments as a resource to be used in other arenas, whether in the Cabinet,the Party or the public arena. As such, we need to know a given minis-ter’s goals and strategies. Of course, these two affect each other, so thestrategies that a minister adopts will affect his/her performance of thevarious ministerial roles, while the roles a minister emphasises willdepend to some extent on his or her goals.

For example, a crucial, perhaps the most crucial, goal of many minis-ters is to advance his/her career; most often to survive, to win promo-tion or, even, to become Prime Minister. In pursuit of this goal aminister may wish to put his/her stamp on a department, followingthe logic that making such an impact will advance his or her career.However, a minister might equally think that pleasing the PrimeMinister, rather than forwarding the interests of the department, is asurer way of promotion. The point here is that we can’t simply assumethat all ministers want to shape their department.

Probably most ministers want to make some impact on their depart-ments, although this is not always the case. As we saw, some ministers,like Lord Carrington or Douglas Hurd, were content to manage theirdepartment; to be reactive, not pro-active. Others, such as PatrickJenkin, had very limited policy ambitions. However, even if a ministerwants to affect policy, it is far from inevitable s/he will do so. S/heneeds the ability to do so, a clear agenda and good strategic judgement.

Of course, ministers are not blessed with equal ability. As anexample, in his time in the DEn, Nigel Lawson used his intellect andpolitical skill to significantly improve the fledgling status of the depart-ment and his own influence over energy policy-making generally andprivatisation policy particularly. In contrast, Keith Joseph wanted tocreate a new agenda, but lacked the political will to push it throughand spent too long prevaricating over policy issues. Besides commit-


ment and skill, ministers who want to change departments need a clearagenda, a vision of what they want to do, and an appropriate strategyfor achieving that change. Such a strategy implies a sound politicaljudgement about the opportunities and constraints of the contextwithin which policy is made.

A comparison between Benn, Howard and Lilley is particularlyinstructive in relation to these last two points. Both Howard andBenn were prepared to ignore official advice because they believedthat it was tailored to the departmental line. In addition, Bennadopted an interventionist agenda that alienated the Prime Ministerand the Cabinet. His department did not support him, partly becausehe consulted political advisers rather than civil servants and partlybecause they knew he lacked the support of the Prime Minister andthe Cabinet. In contrast, Howard pursued policies that were compati-ble with broader government policy and cultivated Prime Ministerialsupport. In this context, he had no difficulty in getting his depart-ment’s support for the policies, even though they represented a breakwith the departmental view.

Peter Lilley recognised that there was a commitment in the DSS topolicies of universal welfare and that it would be difficult to changesocial security policy without the support of the department. He there-fore opted to pursue a strategy of incremental change and was assistedby his long tenure in office, which enabled him to build allianceswithin the department and, in so doing, bring the DSS round to hisway of thinking:

I took a deliberate decision that you could only get reform if you carried people with you and you can only carry people withyou if you raised the profile of welfare reform and made it seemsomething that we needed to do. Which I thought we did but Ithought we could convince people of that and that then once theytake that general thesis then individual reforms would becomeeasier.

The different approaches adopted by Benn, Howard and Lilley suggestthat, although it is important to know how a minister perceiveshis/her role, in order to understand a minister’s success we also needto look more closely at the context within which he or she operatesand, in particular, at his/her relations with the Prime Minister andthe department.


Structural resources

It is also clear that ministers have different structural resources when itcomes to shaping policy. In part, these structural resources are organi-sational. In particular, the culture and status of a department and thenature of the relationship between a minister and the Prime Ministerare crucial organisational resources. However, at the same time, thestructural resources which a department and a minister have are likelyto be affected by the broader social, economic and political context. So,at the time of the Falklands War the importance of the Foreign Officeand the Ministry of Defence clearly increased, while at the time of theminers’ strike the DEn came to the fore.

The organisational context

Ministers are constrained by the structural and cultural context withindepartments. So, many ministers viewed the departmental culture, andthe associated policy agenda, as exercising a structural constraint ontheir autonomy of action. As an example, the culture of the HomeOffice, and the related consistent liberal agenda it followed betweenthe 1960s and the 1990s, constrained the autonomy of a series ofConservative Home Secretaries in their first decade in office.

Of course, such a constraint may inhibit, but it doesn’t prevent,change. So, Michael Howard was able to alter the culture in the HomeOffice. Similarly, the relatively unified DSS was changed successfully byPeter Lilley, partly because he had the expertise and the time todevelop his agenda and foster close relations with his civil servants. Hewas therefore able to see policy changes through.

Certainly, the status of a department also makes a difference. A DSSofficial confirmed that change is difficult in a department with a longhistory of pursuing a particular line of policy: ‘You cannot changesocial security overnight. It just can’t be done. Some changes take yearsbut all changes take a long time.’ This partly involves an assessment ofthe power of a departmental culture and partly is a reference to anissue mentioned in the introductory chapter; any government in afield like social security inherits a great deal of legislation, and thusexpenditure commitments, which are difficult to change in the short,or even medium terms. In the words of Richard Rose, government isabout inheritance before choice.

Of course, as we saw in the last chapter, ministers operate within abroader organisational context and, as such, they need structuralsupport to achieve agenda change. Most fundamentally of course, a min-


ister needs time and that resource lies in the gift of the Prime Ministerwho can appoint or dismiss a minister. Ministers who lack time eitherbecause they are in office for a short period or because they are over-whelmed by events while in office are unlikely to make a large impact.

At the same time, and this is a point we have already emphasised, min-isters need the backing of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to achievechange. Without it, as Tony Benn found out, it is impossible to achieve change; with it, as Michael Howard showed, it is possible toachieve change without the wholehearted support of a department.

The broader structural context

Ministers were also constrained by the broader social, economic andpolitical context in which they were operating. They may be con-strained by political events, as was the case, for example, withWaddington in the Home Office, or by changing economic pressures,as, for example, those which faced Carrington in DEn. In other cases,and perhaps most often, these two factors interact. So, during theminers’ strike the status of the DEn was heightened by the fact that the‘confrontation’ between the government and the NUM had both eco-nomic and political importance.

Actually, the fluctuating position of the DEn illustrates anothersignificant point. As Hoopes (1996) shows, the status of the DEn alsoconsiderably increased as a result of both the changes in the interna-tional oil markets and the move towards privatisation. So, changes inthe broader economic and political context contribute to changes inorganisational structure – in the case of DEn an increase in the impor-tance of the department. However, ironically, as we saw in Chapter 4,ultimately the ‘success’ of the privatisation process also contributed tothe demise of the DEn.

The interactive effects

The point here is hopefully clear given the previous discussion. Wecannot analyse change without recognising the interactive relationshipbetween structure and agency. We have seen in this chapter that indi-vidual ministers have been crucial in changing the culture and policyagenda of departments, but they do so within the context of an exist-ing organisational structure and culture, within the department andmore broadly throughout Whitehall, which constrains their actions.They are also constrained or facilitated in achieving their ends by thebroader economic and social context. Even so, ministers can, and do,


change the culture and structure and that changed culture and struc-ture provides the context within which subsequent ministers operate.In that sense, the process is interactive and iterative.

Did ideas drive institutional change?

In our view, there are two main reasons for the increase in the numberof agenda-setting ministers during the Conservative administrationsand these both illustrate the influence of ideas in shaping institutionalchange. Firstly, all of the ministers concerned were ideologues drawnfrom the right of the Conservative Party, so they had an alternativeideological position from which to develop policy proposals. As such,the ideological commitments of some ministers, especially Howard,Young and Lawson, drove their attempts to redirect their departments.Of course, not all Conservative ministers were drawn from the right ofthe Party, so not all, probably not most, ministers favoured a radical,often ‘New Right’, agenda; thus many ministers didn’t want to refocustheir departments.

Second, most Conservative ministers in this period also had a differ-ent view of what the relationship should be between themselves andofficials than that enshrined in the traditional, Haldane model. TheHaldane model saw officials and ministers as partners; civil servantscould be trusted to exercise considerable discretion (Foster andPlowden 1996; Richards 1997; Richards and Smith 2000). In contrast,the Thatcher governments were more critical of civil servants whomthey viewed as a cause of, rather than a solution to, what they regardedas the core of the governance problem; weak, ineffective, governmentpursuing consensual policies because it was in thrall to particular inter-ests. To break out of this stultifying embrace government and ministersneeded to exercise executive autonomy. As such, to the Conservativesthe chief role of the Civil Service was not to advise on policy but toassist the ministers in carrying out government policy. At the sametime, the Conservatives were more willing to use special advisers,although not to consult interest groups, as alternative sources of infor-mation. All this meant that Conservative ministers were encouraged tolead their department, to change departmental thinking and, inBulpitt’s (1986) term, to project an image of governing competence.

Once again, however, we need to acknowledge that the relationshipbetween ideas and institutions is not a unidirectional relationship.Ideas do shape institutions and inform institutional change. However,it is within the context of institutions that ideas develop and are subse-


quently mediated. While the Conservative, ‘New Right’ view of theCivil Service did inform Conservative ministers’ attitudes to the CivilService and their commitment to Civil Service reform, the outcome, interms of the effect on Civil Service attitudes, was restricted because ofthe persistence of an alternative Civil Service view of the past, presentand proper future role of civil servants. Furthermore, the current gov-ernment’s view of the Civil Service, which we shall consider in a futurebook, is itself shaped by the current sets of institutional relations,which themselves were shaped by the Conservatives’ ideas. Again, it iscrucial to recognise this is an interactive and iterative process.

Conclusion

Our research suggests there has been a change in the role of ministers.Partly because of their ideological commitments, and partly because ofthe Conservative government’s negative view of the role of the CivilService as a bastion of consensus, ministers have become more proac-tive in policy-making. Twenty-five years ago, Whitehall was more insu-lated from outside pressures and most ministers’ advice came fromofficials. In such an environment, most ministers’ ambitions to changepolicy were limited. In the 1980s, some ministers had grander plans tointroduce permanent change in the general directions of their depart-ment and they often looked outside the department for policy advice.All ministers, except those who lacked time or were overwhelmed bycrisis, had some policy role. However, this is not to suggest ministersare omnipotent actors, able to bring about significant political and cul-tural changes inside and outside departments. Rather, their actionsneed to be considered within the structural and cultural context withinwhich they operate. Both the organisational structure within a depart-ment and beyond, and the broader economic and political contextbeyond the department constrain ministers. However, ministers areimportant. Civil servants cannot act alone; they lack the legitimacy todo anything without ministerial authority, which explains their prefer-ence for decisive ministers. Consequently, ministers are potentialagents of change. Of course, as we saw, many ministers do not want tointroduce a new agenda into their department and some who wish todo so fail.

7The Changing Relations betweenMinisters and Civil Servants

We have seen in previous chapters that much has changed withindepartments. In this chapter, we examine the impact of these changeson the relationship between ministers and civil servants. As we saw inChapter 2, the Whitehall culture is crucial in constructing the rolesand values of officials. As such, we would expect changes in culture toproduce changes in the power relationships between ministers andofficials.

There are two sets of literature which argue that such changes have occurred. Dunleavy’s (1991) bureau-shaping model suggests that senior civil servants have shaped change in their interests. In contrast, Campbell and Wilson (1995) and Foster and Plowden(1996) argue that the traditional symbiotic relationship betweenministers and civil servants has been undermined as officials have increasingly become bearers of ministers’ wishes. This chapter is critical of these both positions, arguing that the continued influenceof the values of the Westminster model means that the relationshipremains one of interdependency and that, whilst the relationshipshave changed, officials retain a key role in policy-making.

The chapter is divided into three substantive sections. The first section assesses the utility of the bureau-shaping model.Subsequently, the second section critically examines the view thatConservative changes in the 1980s and 1990s mean that ministers nowdominate civil servants. The last substantive section then argues for apower-dependency model of that relationship and suggests why minis-ters and civil servants share similar views about the nature of that rela-tionship.

155


Assessing the bureau-shaping model

Outlining the bureau-shaping model

The most contemporary sophisticated model which analyses CivilService power is Dunleavy’s (1991) bureau-shaping model which hasjustifiably received a great deal of attention both at a theoretical leveland as an explanation of recent changes in the public sector in Britainand elsewhere. Dunleavy rejects the traditional public choice budgetmaximisation models of bureaucratic behaviour (see Dowding 1995 fordiscussion). In contrast, Dunleavy argues that senior bureaucrats areconcerned to maximise the status and quality of their work. In particu-lar, he contends that senior civil servants are most interested in theirpolicy advice functions. Consequently, when high-ranking officials arefaced with institution-wide cuts, they reshape their bureaux into smallstaff agencies in order to protect themselves and their agencies andallow them to concentrate on the policy advisory role that they prefer.

We shall only briefly outline the bureau-shaping model here (but seeDunleavy 1989, 1991; Dowding 1995; Marsh, Smith and Richards2000). However, the model’s key theme is that, when faced with theprospect of losing time for policy-advice work, high-ranking officialswill become keen advocates of separating out policy from managementfunctions in order to allow them to maintain, or even increase, theproportion of time they spend on policy-related work. The bureau-shaping model thus generates three propositions:

• Senior civil servants have less interest in the management of theirdepartments and more interest in their role as policy advisers.

• The development of Next Steps agencies in Britain was encouragedby senior civil servants.

• The outcome of the Conservative reforms has been to take manager-ial responsibilities away from senior civil servants and allow them toconcentrate on policy advice.

As such, to a significant extent, the model is premised on the notionthat senior civil servants, not politicians, have the power to control thereform process.

A critique of the bureau-shaping model

Here, we use our interview evidence to examine each of the threepropositions derived from the bureau-shaping model.

The Changing Relations between Ministers and Civil Servants 157

Proposition 1: senior civil servants prefer policy to management work

Our interviews suggest two clear conclusions. First, it is not easy forsenior bureaucrats to maximise the policy function for two reasons.The simple distinction between the policy advice function and themanagement function on which much of Dunleavy’s model is based isin practice problematic. At the same time, the job of senior officials, inparticular the Permanent Secretaries, inevitably involves major man-agerial responsibilities. Second, not every senior civil servant attachessuch a high value to policy work and such a low value to managementas the bureau-shaping model assumes.

Obviously, most senior civil servants in both agencies and coredepartments are involved in policy and management. This point isevident if we consider the job remit of Permanent Secretaries. There arethree, broad, elements to their work: administering the department;managing the policy process; and specific policy work. The first isexclusively managerial; the second combines management and policy,although perhaps with the main emphasis on management; only thethird involves a focus on policy.

Two points are crucial here. First, Permanent Secretaries have alwayshad a crucial management role and, since the Next Steps reforms, theyappear more, rather than less, involved in management than was pre-viously the case. Second, those most involved in policy work are notPermanent Secretaries or Deputy Secretaries, but much lower level civilservants, those located at what, in the pre-Senior Management Reviewdays, was Grade 5. Indeed, the further up the Whitehall hierarchy acivil servant progresses, the less policy-orientated he or she becomes.As such, it seems to us that it is not as easy as the bureau-shapingmodel suggests for senior civil servants to maximise their policy advi-sory functions and hive-off their management functions.

At the same time, the assumption that high-ranking officials have astrong preference for policy work over management functions lies atthe centre of the bureau-shaping model. However, this is not sup-ported by evidence from our interviews. It is clear that some seniorcivil servants enjoy management, if not as the most important strandof their work, then as one of their core functions. As a member of theoriginal Efficiency Unit said:

Some of them were interested in management and couldn’t get todo it, others just weren’t interested at all, but I think what was hap-pening by the mid-80s was the financial structures were improving,


the FMI was producing management information. People werebeginning to have regular annual reviews of management … So,even then, there were people who were interested in all aspects ofmanagement.

To the extent that a simple dichotomy between the policy advice andthe management function is possible, some civil servants appear toprefer policy work, others management work and yet others a balancebetween the two. It is also apparent that preferences can change overtime. One Permanent Secretary commented that the establishment ofagencies in his department transformed his working day:

Prior to Next Steps, I was still doing, or would have been doing, a lotof policy; probably 50 per cent or so. I would have done about 20 per cent on management, about 20 per cent with the accountingofficer and 10 per cent on senior personnel. From 1988 on, I wasspending less than 30 per cent of my time on policy, 30 per cent onmanagement, 20 per cent with the accounting officer, 10 per centsenior personnel and 10 per cent visiting agency offices. This madethe running of the Department more efficient and was something Iwelcomed.

Similarly, another Permanent Secretary argued that the reforms had ledto a marked reduction in his day-to-day involvement in policy:

After the introduction of Next Steps, I spent about a third of mytime on policy. However, most of my time was spent on long-termstrategy with my board discussing where we were going to be in fiveyears time. I was not sorting out today’s policy problem, unless itwas a really catastrophic one and they wanted my help. My juniorofficials prided themselves on being able to sort out most problems.They liked to come to me and tell me they’ve found a problem andthey’ve solved it and I needn’t worry. So, I would only be botheredby policy that was either pretty insoluble or needed some outsidehelp, the help of other departments where ministers needed to betalked to, or where I could actually use my experience and ability.

The problem for the bureau-shaping model lies in the centrality of theassumption of homogeneity to the claims being made. If the model isto ‘explain’ the Conservative Whitehall reforms, it is a necessary condi-tion that top civil servants shared a preference for policy-making. Our


evidence indicates that not all share this preference, or at least not tothe same extent, and this in turn limits the utility of the model.

Proposition 2: senior civil servants were the force behind the Next Stepsprogramme

What role did senior civil servants play in the origins of Next Steps andhow did they react to the proposals? Our interviews suggest three clearconclusions:

• The impetus for these changes was political; it did not come fromcivil servants.

• Many senior civil servants possessed far from perfect informationabout the changes; they underestimated both the political will thatwas behind them and their potential impact.

• Although many senior civil servants opposed the changes, there waslittle, if any, organised opposition.

The bureau-shaping model seems to assume that senior civil servantsare relatively that they have significant autonomy. In our view, theyare constrained by the political and cultural context in which theyoperate and, in particular, by the wishes of ministers, by the broaderCivil Service culture and by their construction of each of these twothings.

Certainly, evidence from our interviews indicated the role of politi-cians was crucial in the evolution and development of Next Steps. This,of course, contradicts the argument that the process was driven bybureaucrats and, more broadly, it fundamentally questions the thesisthat it is civil servants who are able to shape events or issues in their, asopposed to the minister’s, favour. In the late 1980s, the extent and thespeed of the reform were a result of direct political pressure from theCabinet. This pressure had enormous influence because it emanatedfrom the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (see Chapters 3 and6). Thus, the process should be understood as one in which the politi-cians were dictating and civil servants were then responding.

This suggests that bureau-shaping may often be driven by ministers,not senior bureaucrats. In this case, it is well-documented that theimpetus for change came from Peter Kemp, Second PermanentSecretary at the Cabinet Office between 1988 and 1992 and ProjectManager for the Next Steps programme, who had strong support fromthe Prime Minister. More broadly, it is widely accepted that the


Conservatives’ reforms of central government were driven by politi-cians and not by bureaucrats. Certainly senior ex-Conservative minis-ters’ memoirs (Heseltine 1987; Thatcher 1993, Lawson 1992) and theacademic texts (Foster and Plowden 1996) substantiate this view. Theweight of evidence does not support any suggestion that the reformprocess was bureaucratically driven, rather it suggests that, even if theyhad wanted to, senior officials were not in a position to forward theirown preferences at the expense of their political masters. The politicalcontext was absolutely crucial. We did not find any senior official whofelt the initiative had come from the Civil Service, although allacknowledged the crucial role of Peter Kemp in the process.

Many civil servants underestimated the likely impact of these reformsand perhaps also the political will behind them. Of those who reacted,some were enthusiastic, some were agnostic and some were obstructive.Perhaps more interestingly, the initial reaction within particular depart-ments appeared driven at the political, not the bureaucratic, level. Thus,for example, a senior Home Office official observed that:

Douglas Hurd (Home Secretary between 1985 and 1989) was simplynot interested in transferring the Prison Service to agency status.However, after Waddington (Home Secretary 1989–90) got hisfingers burnt with Strangeways, Kenneth Baker saw agencification asa political opportunity to distance himself from this monstrousorganisation which had the potential to ruin his political career.

Similarly, a senior official at the DTI argued: ‘Initially we didn’t reactto the Next Steps Report. However, David Young (then Secretary ofState) was very keen on setting up agencies and this ensured ourdepartment was at the forefront of the process.’ The departmentresponded to the will of the minister. A DSS official also noted thesluggish manner in which his department reacted to Next Steps andagain emphasised that the department made calculations about thepolitical will behind the reform:

At the outset, we adopted the usual Whitehall reaction that was toask the question: ‘do we respond to this in token fashion to get boththe centre and the minister off our back or do we react with some-thing big?’ Expediency suggested the latter option.

In contrast, officials in the Home Office were opposed to the PrisonService becoming an agency. In this vein, a senior employee in the


Prison Agency maintained that senior officials in the Home Office didnot see agency status for the Prison Service as being in their interests:

To the career civil servants, the Prison Service is absolutely core andthe idea that they won’t be able to rotate through here, that theywon’t have jobs here and they are not in a position to know betterthan anybody else what should happen in the agency they findreally worrying … they have a strong set of beliefs about how thePrison Service and Home Office ought to be run.

As these comments show, one needs to disaggregate the experiencesof different Whitehall departments in order to understand thedynamics involved in the Next Steps reforms. Various departmentsresponded to the Next Steps initiative in different ways. Yet, at ageneral level, the process was driven by ministerial initiative and itdramatically altered the structural and organisational character ofWhitehall. By 1997, 135 agencies were in existence, accounting forover 78 per cent of the Civil Service.

Proposition 3: Conservative reforms led to senior civil servants becomingmore policy-orientated

The bureau-shaping model predicts that, after the Next Step reforms,the balance between the management and the policy advisory func-tions of senior civil servants changed, with senior bureaucrats able toconcentrate more upon policy work while the new agencies dealt withthe more mundane administrative tasks.

It is generally accepted by both practitioners and commentators thatmanagerialism became firmly ingrained in the discourse and the oper-ating procedures of the machinery of government throughout the1980s and 1990s. In this context, a sizeable shift occurred in the timePermanent Secretaries and other senior officials allocated to each of thethree roles identified above. In fact, it appears that the reforms duringthe Conservative years have meant that the work of most, if not all,senior civil servants has become more, rather than less, managerial.Indeed, none of our interviewees, whether retired or serving, thoughtthat the policy role of Permanent Secretaries had increased since theNext Steps reforms, while the majority thought that the managementrole had increased. So, one serving Permanent Secretary argued:

I would guess that in the 1970s, the management of a departmentwas a small part of a Permanent Secretary’s job, significantly behind


policy work or departmental representation. When I became aDeputy Secretary in 1984, I would have said the balance between thevarious functions of a senior official were of about equal proportions.But from then on, management, including personnel management,but also systematic management, was to become the real thing.

Another official appointed as a Permanent Secretary in the 1980s argued:

As a Permanent Secretary, I’m surprised at the amount of timewhich needs to be spent on management given that manyPermanent Secretaries over the years have not given the impressionthat was a key part of the role. It’s very difficult to avoid pure man-agement responsibilities; I mean I wouldn’t want to avoid themanyway, but I was surprised at how often they just hit my desk.

While another senior official claimed that the move to agencies had, insome senses, given him more managerial responsibilities:

One of my big jobs is actually to see that the agencies all worktogether because they are part of the Department, not units simplyleft on the periphery. The agency chief executives all sit on mydepartmental board. A lot of my time is taken up by making sure weall agree about how things are going and how we are going toapproach the corporate issues needing to be dealt with.

Nowhere in our interviews did we come across evidence from thesenior officials suggesting that the reforms of the Conservative admin-istration increased their own policy function. Thus, the irony of thereforms, from a bureau-shaping perspective at least, is that there hasbeen an increase in the management of the machinery of Whitehall, atthe expense of the policy process.

Of course, Permanent Secretaries have always had management roles,but we would argue that they were not as prominent or, perhaps, theywere not taken as seriously in the past. As a very senior civil servantnoted: ‘I think (the Permanent Secretary’s) role was always managerialand I think it ought to have been, but I don’t think they took muchinterest in it.’

A number of our interviewees, particularly those with experience ofmore than one department, did point out that the level of manage-ment responsibilities involved in the Permanent Secretary’s job variedconsiderably between departments. However, the consensual view was


that following both the Next Steps reforms and the SeniorManagement Review (see Chapter 3), officials at Grades 1 and 2 havebecome increasingly marginal to the policy process, being ever moreconcerned with managerial responsibilities. So, as regards the thirdproposition, the evidence from our interviews indicates that theConservative reforms of Whitehall actually reduced both the time andnumbers of senior mandarins involved in policy work; at present, theyare more involved in the management function than in previous erasin Whitehall.

The bureau-shaping model: a flawed analysis?

In our view, the bureau-shaping model represents a significant advanceon previous public choice models of bureaucratic behaviour whichstress budget maximisation. However, it is flawed. First, we wouldargue that the model pays insufficient attention to the broader politicalcontext within which civil servants operate. This is one of the ways inwhich the model is mis-specified. The broader political context con-strains the options available to civil servants and significantly affectstheir ability independently to determine the shape of their bureaux.

Second, the consequence of the reforms has not been to increase theinvolvement of senior civil servants in policy-making. At present, theyare primarily managers. Indeed, if anything, their managerial role hasincreased since the creation of Next Step agencies and this was acommon theme in our interviews. Of course, senior civil servants mayhave expected a greater policy role after the reforms, but if they did soit was a strategic miscalculation.

In our view, many of the weaknesses of Dunleavy’s model reflect thebroader weaknesses of rational choice theory. The emphasis is onintentional explanation and preferences are assumed, not explained.No role is given to structure or culture in explaining outcomes. Indeed,what is assumed, or ignored, is much of the legitimate subject matterof political science and sociology. In essence, the key problem is thatrational choice theory cannot explain the dynamics of change. To doso requires a dialectical approach to the relationship between structureand agency and a recognition that the meaning individuals ascribe tostructure, culture and action affects their behaviour.

At a broader level, our analysis of the bureau-shaping model providesa useful critique of the view that civil servants dominate ministers in azero-sum game. Clearly, what our analysis emphasises is that such ananalysis often misunderstands the structured setting within which civil


servants operate and the political constraints which ministers canimpose on even the most senior civil servants. As such, we contendthat those who continue to advocate the Yes Minister model ofWhitehall misunderstand the true dynamics involved in minister–civilservant relations.

The reassertion of executive dominance

We saw in Chapter 3 that much of the reform of central government isconcerned with re-establishing executive government. This has led anumber of authors to suggest that the traditional constitutional modelof minister–civil servant relations has broken down. As we saw inChapter 4, this conception of the relationship is based on the notionthat ministers and civil servants trust each other and, consequently,officials have a central role in the policy-making process. To someextent, they have a monopoly of policy advice and almost a totalmonopoly of political advice (political in the sense of how to play pol-itics in the arenas of Whitehall and Westminster). Campbell andWilson (1995) and Foster and Plowden (1996) argue that the reforms ofthe Thatcher years destroyed the traditional role of officials. Accordingto Campbell and Wilson (1995: 60), the Whitehall model has beenundermined, with:

civil servants increasingly defining their role as policy imple-menters rather than policy analysts, people who gave ministerswhat they said they wanted, rather than functioning as what theydisparagingly call ‘quasi-academics’ who tried to show politicansthe full consequences, adverse as well as positive, of their policyproposals.

In some ways, this is an accurate representation of changes that haveoccurred. As we have seen, there has been an attempt to assert amanagerial culture over the public service culture and this hasaffected the nature of the relationship between ministers andofficials. To some extent, the presumption of the traditional valueswas that officials had the facts and by informing ministers of the realworld situation, sensible policy would overcome ideological whim.

However, Chapter 6 outlined the increased policy activism of min-isters who have been less prepared to accept departmental advice. Inour interviews, a number of officials did believe that ministers were


less likely to accept advice than had been the case in the past. OneDTI official said that there was a lack of trust between officials andministers from the day Thatcher arrived in office. He continued:‘and now it is ineradicable, there is a whole generation of politicianson one side and civil servants on the other who don’t trust eachother’. A more considered illustration is provided by a formerPermanent Secretary:

Just because a thing is recommended doesn’t mean to say that theminister is bound to do it, the minister has other sources andother values and he will say, ‘No, I don’t think that it is right’, forx, y, z … An example is if you said to Kenneth Clarke, nosmoking in the office, research has suggested that smoke comingthrough air conditioning ducts will in fact involve people ininvoluntary smoking. He might say, ‘Where’s the evidence forthat? Those scientists, I don’t believe them and I know themanyway and that’s got no foundation whatsoever, you can’t basepolicy on that.’

A very senior official put it succinctly: ‘Some ministers want to have adebate, others want to tell you what to do and they want a service.And more ministers tend to be in the latter vein than before.’

A DTI official believed that the change did not begin with the elec-tion of Thatcher but was a gradual process:

My clear impression is that civil servants had much more weightin 1947; the then Permanant Secretaries were powerful. DonaldFerguson obviously had a major influence on the promulgation ofpolicy and there was one minister and one ParliamentarySecretary. It was very clearly established that in the minister’sabsence the Permanent Secretary was in charge of the Departmentand I think that they had very great weight in the promulgationof policy. That probably continued through to the 1970s, butperhaps it was linked to the rather sharper, or much sharper, divi-sion between political parties from the 1970s onwards. Theinfluence of civil servants did become less and there were morejunior ministers around and they were given areas of responsibil-ity and wanted to be consulted on those areas of responsibilityand take decisions in them.


But the picture that emerges is complex; there has not been a simpleshift from a ‘Whitehall model’ to a ‘ministerial dominance’ model. Asone senior DSS official outlined:

Things actually work best when ministers and their staff have got amutual understanding which was the kind of Civil Service I joinedback in the 1950s … it never struck me then that there would beany serious conflict between my minister and my bosses up in theoffice. They would all be in cahoots.

This official then suggested that, when the Conservatives came in, theywanted to put the bureaucracy in its place and put ministers in change.In his words: ‘“Yes Minister” was painting a picture of something whichI think had actually passed.’ Yet, he still pointed out that:

Most ministers don’t have long enough tenure to be able to reallyget a total grip on their subject. And they, to that degree, tend to bea bit in the hands of their Departments … Fowler … workedextremely closely with civil servants. He wasn’t into any of this non-sense of putting them in their place.

Of course, Michael Howard insisted that, despite the various pressreports, he listened carefully to his officials:

I always wanted to have my views tested. I was trying to changethings and had quite strong views on the direction in which Iwanted things to change but I also knew there might be things thatI had never thought of. So, I never claimed in any of my jobs ingovernment, ‘Is this really the right thing to do for reasons A B C DE?’, and I would argue it out with them. There were occasions whenI was convinced I had a good idea when it wasn’t. Very often wewould have the argument and I wasn’t convinced that what Iwanted to do was wrong so we did it.

Indeed, a senior official who worked in the Home Office supported theHoward version:

Michael Howard had a good relationship with officials in the sensethat he expected them to produce the fullest and best possibleadvice. He welcomed that, he welcomed debate with them and veryoften he did not agree with what they said but the debate was


there, conducted quite openly and in a civilised way … Thesestories gathered weight probably because I guess there were moredisagreements between Howard and officials over criminal justicepolices than was the case, for example, with Douglas Hurd. Butthat’s because Michael Howard was working to one agenda andDouglas Hurd to another.

Many other officials rejected the notion that relationships had brokendown in the 1980s and 1990s. According to one, talking towards theend of the Major administration: ‘I think certainly the senior Treasuryofficials all get on very well with the Chancellor and the ChiefSecretary.’

It is also the case that, as in other areas, the personalism of thesystem and the degree of ministerial autonomy mean that the natureof the relationship depends on the department and the minister. Asone official pointed out:

Your experience around Whitehall depends very much on who yourminister is and what his/her attitude is. Some ministers think theyare there to run the Department and others think that thePermanent Secretary is there to do that and they are only there togive broad instructions. I think that will continue to vary dependingon the personality and predilection of ministers.

The problem of interpretation is partly theoretical and methodological.If you talk to lots of civil servants, some will have found the changes ofthe Conservative period difficult, whilst others will have no interest insaying that their relationships are problematic. It is also true that, ifofficials want to have any influence, they have to make their relation-ship with the minister work; that is the constitutional imperative.Therefore, to avoid quote and counter-quote, it is important to developsome means of analysing the relationship. We are not arguing that therelationship between officials and ministers has not changed, but toargue that ministers have become powerful as a result of changes is tooversimplify the relationship. Whilst wider structural changes mayhave changed the balance of resources between ministers and officialsso that ministers have more and officials have less, the relationship isstill one of interdependence. Therefore, we avoid the question of whois more powerful, ministers or officials? Moreover, as recent debatesover secrecy and constitutional reform indicate (see Richards and


Figure 7.1 Resources of Prime Ministers, ministers and officials

Prime Minister Ministers Officials

Patronage Policy support PermanenceAuthority Authority KnowledgePolitical support/ Department TimeParty political support/ Knowledge Whitehall networkelectorate Policy networks Control over informationPrime Minister’s Office Policy success Keepers of the constitutionBilateral policy-making

Smith 2001b), many of the assumptions of the Westminster model arestill retained in the discourse of officials and ministers and, as such,there continues to be an important self-perception that the traditionalrelationships are still in place. This perception, of course, influenceshow officials and ministers interact. So, although the patterns ofdependency have changed, resource dependency continues to providethe most appropriate framework for analysing the relationship. Thus, we advocate a power-dependency model in order to understandminister–civil servant relations.

Advocating a power-dependency model

Outlining the model

As we saw in Chapter 3, the power-dependency model contends that, inorder to understand the nature of the state, it is important to examine thecore executive, not only as a formal set of institutions, but also as anumber of overlapping and interconnecting networks in which actorsexchange resources (Rhodes 1997; Smith 1998, 1999a). Within the coreexecutive a range of institutions can be identified which are connected bytheir mutual dependence on each other. For example, departments needthe Prime Minister’s authority in Cabinet, while the Prime Minister needsdepartments to develop and implement policy. Hence, a network ofmutual dependency is established. Extending this theme, the impact thatthe Prime Minister, a Cabinet Minister or a civil servant has on a policydepends upon these structures of dependency. Thus, all actors in the coreexecutive are located within a particular structured setting that is, in part,shaped by the resources they command (see Figure 7.1). In order tounderstand civil servant–minister relations, we need to take account ofstructure, resources and agency. Power concerns the exchange of


resources within a structured setting, but is dependent on the choicesof actors. So, whilst resources may have shifted towards ministers, theycontinue to be dependent on exchanging resources with officials, who,through their tactics, can have a high degree of influence.

There are a number of aspects of the structural context within whichcivil servants and ministers act which constrain or enable their actions.

• Civil servants are constrained by rules governing their behaviour,authority and sphere of influence.

• Ministers are constrained by their status and functional responsibility.• Both may be constrained by financial markets, international agree-

ments, history and culture etc.

So, the structure shapes the environment in which agents operate anddefines the range of potential strategies they might deploy. This leadsto the observation that structures can constrain or enable the actionsof agents, but they do not determine policy outcomes (see Chapter 1;Hay 1995; Marsh et al. 1999). Structure impacts on the core executivein three ways:

• It limits the actions of the state. So, for example, Britain’s positionin the world economy constrains the policy options of government.

• It is reflected in the institutions of central government. As such, itlimits what departments do, how they perceive problems and theactions that they take.

• It influences the distribution of resources within the state. So, who can do what and who has particular authority are structurally constrained.

What this means is that central government cannot be simply under-stood in terms of the personality and the abilities of office holders.

All actors in the core executive have resources and, therefore, allhave something with which they can bargain in core executive interac-tions. The strength of their bargaining position will depend on theresources they hold and the extent to which other actors need theirresources. Resources are partly structural because they are related to theformal status of actors, be it the Chancellor, Home Secretary or Head ofthe Civil Service, but they may also be personally derived. To anextent, it is possible to specify some of the resources held by variousactors within the core executive (see Figure 7.1).

Of course, all actors in the same structural position or with the sameresources do not act in the same way. In addition, actors may attempt


to change the constraints or maximise their autonomy within thoseconstraints.

Relations between ministers and civil servants under the Conservatives

It is undoubtedly the case that the nature of the constitution – whichplaces ultimate authority in the hands of ministers – and the structuralcontext of managerial reforms, ideological ministers and the creationof new sources of advice increased the resources of ministers vis-à-visofficials. As we have seen in a number of chapters, the postwar periodwas, to some extent, a mandarin’s paradise. Whilst rarely being directlydisloyal to ministers, their monopoly of advice, their control of thedetail of policy and institutional machinery and their presumptionthat they had access to the truth or ‘the facts’ gave officials substantialinfluence over policy. A government that was distrustful of the publicsector, had ideological policy goals and alternative sources of advice, inthink-tanks, personal advisers and consultancies, could challenge thecosy Civil Service world; especially because officials were upholders ofthe Constitution which venerated loyalty to ministers and the govern-ment. However, despite a change in the balance of resources, the rela-tionship between ministers and officials remained one of dependencyand, because of the personalism of British government, in some cases,traditional patterns of relationships continued.

Civil servants remain in control of much of the policy process with,as we saw earlier, officials further down the hierarchy becoming thekey policy-makers. A Grade 2 in the DTI gives a good indication of howthe policy process has changed from the 1960s through to the presentLabour government:

I remember back in 1969 in the Ministry of Power, what wouldhappen was the principal would write two or three pages closelyargued and put it up to his assistant secretary, who that night wouldadd another two pages and would then pass it up to his under secre-tary who would add his own page and, if it was terribly important,it would then go through the deputy secretary and the permanentsecretary and it would land on the minister’s desk as a great thickthing which had contributions all the way from the top down. Thatwas nonsensical but very typical of the way the Civil Service oper-ated thirty years ago … I think now what tends to happen is I havea meeting with two of my people about devolution and how we aregoing to handle assistance to industry in devolution. We’ve beenworking on this topic for some time and devolution has added some


immediacy to it. We’ve had an exchange with our ministers on itabout a fortnight ago and I’ve kept a very close eye on what’s beengoing on, but have contributed very little directly … I went to theministers quite recently and they said yes they agreed with what wewanted to do. So, the Director went off and talked to the Scots,Welsh and Treasury … At an earlier stage, I’d have a meeting withmy opposite numbers to get the process going, but, since, theprocess has been conducted at Grade 5 level, not at mine.

This long quote is illustrative of some important points. First, as wehave seen in Chapter 4, policy-making has become less hierarchical.Detailed policy-making rarely involves Grades 1 and 2 these days. It ismade by 5s and 7s with superiors overseeing the process. To quote oneGrade 2 in the DTI:

There are no fixed rules, but I would expect the basic leg work to bedone at EO (Executive Officer) or HEO (Higher Executive Officer)level, under the supervision of a Grade 7. Then, probably, if it wassomeone a bit new it would be looked at by one person above that.The way I try to operate is to let the system carry on without inter-vening too much.

Of course, the process will vary from department to department andeven from division to division.

Second, despite this crucial change in the policy process, officials con-tinue to be centrally involved in the making of policy. In an era of ‘con-viction’ politics, when ministers are policy activists, there may be moredirection of their policy efforts but officials continue to be central to theprocess. Officials at Grade 5, and increasingly below, draft policy propos-als, to some extent in line with their broad understanding of the minis-ter’s desire but also within the context of departmental culture. A formerGrade 2 described the process. Initially, in the DTI a Grade 5 would:

start developing ideas, then we will discuss these together, do youthink this is right, and it would be a pooling of ideas and experienceof the whole team and somebody will enshrine it in a documentwhich will contain it all … If it is a sufficiently major policy area thepermanent secretary may want to check through with the officialsto see that they had thought of everything.

Another DTI Grade 2 made an important point:

We have a set of objectives now which ministers have agreed to andI can therefore guide the rest of us. But that does not mean we will


all turn over and say whatever you want to do you can do. Buggerthat – that’s not my job.

Yet, it is also true that traditional patterns of policy-making continue.As one Grade 2 in the DTI said:

Currently on my desk at the moment is what sort of trade penaltieswe should support in the EU against Burma for the denial of humanrights … That is not an easy issue to decide.

Here, the process of decision involved:

A rather traditional way of assembling all the relevant facts, makingsure that we know what views are taken by other departments if theissue is going to be political enough to require cross-Whitehall min-isterial decisions, finding out what the views of the other memberstates are likely to be and ultimately try to come to a judgement – aclassic, almost timeless, way of proceeding.

This official reveals that, even in the 1990s, officials were still framing,in an influential way, relatively important decisions.

A senior official in the Home Office gave the perfect summary of thedependency relationship:

It seems to me that the essence of (the minister–civil service rela-tionship) is dynamic interaction. It is not that there is one set ofvalues/positions/needs that the politicians have and another setthat the official system has and they have to produce a compromise.Rather, the people, and the ideas, interact … There wasn’t (before1979) a lot of active policy which was coming out of the politicalsystem, quite a lot was coming up out of the official system. But themoment you get a really strong ideological drive coming out to thepolitical system which a new government will tend to have, theofficial system accommodates to that.

Similarly, a DSS official emphasised:

It’s an iterative process of providing information and advice up toministers and into policy about the outcomes that are beingachieved, through analysis and working with policy.

A good example of the interaction between an ideological ministerwho wants to achieve specific goals, and the official system is a case


touched upon in Chapter 6, Peter Lilley’s reforms of social security.Lilley essentially reformed social security by recognising his depend-ence on officials. The social security reform programme that Lilleyintroduced has already been outlined in Chapter 4. Here, it is impor-tant to highlight his dependency on other elements in the core execu-tive in order to secure change. First, as Lilley observed:

After I had given the Mais Lecture a year into my office, which speltout in detail the direction in which I wanted to go, the Departmentthen knew what I wanted and then over 90 per cent of them backedme. I have nothing but praise really, apart from one or two subsetswho were resistant. I think there were very high calibre people there.

Lilley was also aware that his predecessor, John Moore, had failed inhis attempt to reform the welfare agenda because he had alienated thedepartment:

I did take a strategic view in year one because I really did not want tostart off doing a John Moore, coming in and telling officials thatthey were a lot of bad people, that they had been spending too muchmoney and that their budgets were going to be instantly slashed.

Lilley was tactically adept in the pragmatic way he went about tryingto coax officials round to his way of thinking. In particular, he waitedover a year before spelling out his reform agenda in the Mais lecture.He was certainly more successful than Moore in ensuring that hisofficials worked with him to effect change. As one senior SocialSecurity official noted:

Moore got off on the wrong foot to start with and after that he lostthe goodwill of the Department to support him. Lilley was different.We all realised that the then current welfare climate was unsustain-able and that change was needed. Lilley chose the right way ofgoing about bringing us on board.

Furthermore, Lilley was aware of the fragmented nature of theDepartment of Social Security; a department which, as we saw, hadembraced the Next Steps agency model more rapidly than otherWhitehall departments. Thus, he recognised the need to gain supportfrom the chief executives of the various agencies attached to thedepartment. To do this he established a new management board on


which all the agency chief executives were invited to sit. As one retiredsenior Social Security official observed:

When the six executive agencies were being established we had theidea of setting up a small, central unit. Rather than split theDepartment horizontally, we did it vertically based on payingbenefits, collecting contributions, IT etc. and we had a chief execu-tive in charge of each. These all sat on this new board, which wasno longer a traditional Civil Service board, containing for exampledeputy secretaries. Instead, we had on it all the chief executives,who collectively amounted to non-executive directors.

Clearly, the establishment of the board not only maintained someform of identity for a department which had undergone dramatic reor-ganisation in the early 1990s, but it also created a powerful, institu-tional body within the department. As another official noted:

What we did was keep the running of the Department by sitting onthe board. And they were there to run it in the interests of thewhole Department, so they had at times to sacrifice the interests oftheir own agencies in the greater collective interest of others.

Lilley recognised the importance of, and the power wielded by, thisnew institutional structure. The board had the potential to act either asan institutional break on his reform agenda or as a powerful tooldriving through the reform package. Aware of this, Lilley chose to workwith, not against, the board:

In the final phase, I embarked on what was called the ‘ChangeProgramme’; that was changing the bulk of the administrationwhich of course was located in the agencies, which in turn impliedchanging the whole structure of the agencies. Well, MichaelPartridge [then Permanent Secretary] had established the boardsystem with all the agency heads on the board to try to retain a cor-porate identity. I managed to get them to work with me and thatmade things an awful lot easier in terms of delivering my agenda.

As the differentiated policy model would suggest, policy-making hasbecome more decentralised and the approach is ‘leaner and flatter’especially following the SMR (see Chapters 3 and 4). Nevertheless,


fairly senior officials are still involved in the process which to a largeextent is conducted within a relatively closed and homogeneous arena.

So far we have argued that to treat relations between ministers andcivil servants as a zero-sum game is to misunderstand the dynamicsinvolved in core executive relations. Rather, our interviews indicatethat the power-dependency model is the most appropriate model ofminister–civil servant relations. However, there is one notable trend inthe 1980s and 1990s which still needs to be explained. It is claimedthat, while in power, the Conservatives pursued a successful strategy ofreimposing ministerial power over the bureaucratic machine. This, inturn, raises an issue that is central to an understanding of departments:the nature of Civil Service power within the power-dependency model.

Our interviews suggest that ministers have no problem in controllingtheir officials. With a few exceptions, generally Labour politicians fromthe 1970s, the ministers we interviewed always rejected the view that itwas the officials who held the whip hand. Of course, such a view mayseem counterintuitive for a number of reasons:

• Officials are permanent while ministers are temporary.• Officials have expertise, knowledge and access to information that

ministers lack.• Officials control the bureaucratic machinery.• Ministers have a limited capacity to deal with issues in departments

and, therefore, the majority of decisions are made by officials. Incertain areas, officials are making relatively high level decisions, forexample in trade on tariff negotiations.

Many officials have the luxury of concentrating their energies upononly one policy area. For a minister, time is scarce and often s/he hasto deal not with a specific policy, but with the totality of the develop-ment of departmental policy, as well as devoting time to other func-tions, such as Cabinet, Parliament, Party work and media/PR relations.However, what is important to remember is that ministers essentiallywant to achieve their own goals, whether they are political, electoral orpolicy, and, in that sense, officials are useful to the degree that theyhelp with those goals and irrelevant to the degree they do not. Formost ministers, the power of officials is a question of little meaning;officials are there to support the work of the minister. Ministers havebecome more directive but this has not undermined in a critical sensethe old ‘Whitehall paradigm’. How can we explain, within the contextof the power-dependency model, the fact that power under the


Conservatives shifted from the Civil Service towards ministers? In ourview, it is crucial to reconceptualise Civil Service power in the last 20 years. Under the Conservatives, both the context within which the core executive operated and the resources which its constituentparts possessed altered. Once again, this highlights the fluid nature of the power relations between these actors.

Reconceptualising Civil Service power

In our view, there are three key features of the relationship betweencivil servants and ministers:

• Both officials and ministers have a strong interest in maintainingthe view that officials advise and ministers decide.

• To admit otherwise would be to suggest that ministers were notdecisive politicians and that officials were neither neutral nor actingwith integrity. Moreover, it would expose both officials and minis-ters to important questions about accountability. If officials weremaking decisions, they would have to be directly accountable.

• Except in very exceptional circumstances, officials are loyal toministers.

This loyalty is crucial for two reasons: (a) The officials’ interests lie in the success of the department. For the

department to do well, ministers have to do well. Therefore, officialswant their minister to be successful. The role of the official is highlypolitical because it is concerned with protecting the minister frompolitical flak, both in the context of Whitehall power games and alsothe wider political arena.

(b) Officials cannot act without ministerial cover and therefore theygive loyalty to ministers, in return for ministers providing the trust toallow them to act without continual ministerial direction. Civil Servicepower is not identified as a problem by ministers because, in theirview, it does not challenge their ascendancy. The minister’s ownunderstanding of the relationship therefore remains one based uponthe constitutional model. The case of BSE demonstrated that officialsacted on their own but often their aim was to protect the minister.

Officials operate on a different level to ministers Ministers are concernedwith particular policy decisions and officials are concerned withmaking decisions within a constitutionally informed framework. Aslong as they have ministerial (and therefore constitutional) cover, they


have considerable autonomy. Officials do not oppose ministers, but,through their reproduction of the Whitehall game and by providing‘facts’ for the minister, they determine the terrain on which ministersoperate. In so doing, they are then empowered to undertake decisionswithin an accepted (i.e. constitutionally proper) framework, reflectingthe general goals of the ministers.

During the Conservative administration, the structure, context,resources and tactics of the core executive altered and this, in turn,affected the nature of dependencies involved. This is clear if onecompares and contrasts the observations of retired senior officialsabout their involvement in the policy process during the 1950s and1960s, with the views of contemporary colleagues. So, as one formerPermanent Secretary at the Home Office suggested, in the 1950s and1960s, a minister’s basic function was to ‘carry out the will ofofficials’. One Permanent Secretary, who retired in the late 1980s,observed that:

During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s policy was generated fromwithin the machine at a high level. Whereas nowadays ministersappear to be the generators in the policy process. Now …ministers, more and more, come to look on their top civil servantsas managers running a department, rather than acting as policyadvisers.

Clearly, the structural reforms introduced by the Conservatives, anddealt with in Chapter 3, changed the nature of the job for senior civilservants, pushing policy down the bureaucratic hierarchy, so affectingthe nature of dependency between senior officials and ministers. Asone contemporary Grade 2 DSS official observed in 1997:

The main difference with people like Ann Bowtell [the thenPermanent Secretary] is how they spend their day. The majority ofher time is taken up with management and delivery issues. Thepeople at my level would be much more involved in being the per-sonal adviser to ministers and we would be asking typically the oldGrade 5s to really take up ownership and responsibility for policy. So,we have become a much more delegated and delayered organisation.

However, two other trends have also had an impact on the power-dependency relationship of the core executive. The first, outlined inChapter 3, was the change in the type of senior official appointed to


the highest grades in Whitehall. This is what Richards (1997) refers toas the ‘personalisation’ of the senior Civil Service during the Thatcheryears in which ‘managerially oriented can-doers’ were appointed to themost senior grades.

The other notable trend to affect the nature of the dependencies wasthe decision, taken early on by the Thatcher Cabinet, to use outsideconsultants. This made the government less dependent on the CivilService as a source of knowledge and information. One contemporarysenior official in the Cabinet Office observed the shift under theConservatives to the use of consultancy firms in the policy process:

There was undoubtedly, in the early 1980s, a drive to bring inprivate sector consultancy firms, reflecting the view of the govern-ment that the public sector was inefficient and did not know how todo things.

A retired Permanent Secretary explained what he thought was theraison d’être behind this change in the policy process.

It was quite clear that the Thatcher government was generallyhostile towards the public sector and, more specifically, the CivilService. She wanted change and she wanted it fast. Her view wasthat these grey men in Whitehall would not be willing to deliver heragenda for change, so why don’t we get someone else to. That waswhen we saw the rise and rise in the use of consultancy firms bygovernment.

The use of consultants was a practice that continued throughout muchof the 1980s, but in the Major years their use came under scrutiny andwas subsequently reduced on grounds of cost-efficiency. As one con-temporary official observed:

Consultancy was the thing in the 1980s, but it was then rather criti-cised by Ken Clarke [Chancellor of the Exchequer 1993–7] in the1990s due to the amount of money which was being spent on con-sultants. In particular, because he recognised he could get similaradvice, at much cheaper cost to the tax-payers, from his own civilservants.

Thus, at the start of the Thatcher administration, the use of consul-tants became an additional component of the policy-making process


and one that altered the balance of resources within the core executive.Their use was cut back during the 1990s, but they still remain a keyalternative resource which ministers can utilise.

Conclusion: democracy, power, elitism and the coreexecutive

Both the differentiated policy model and the ‘end of the Whitehall par-adigm’ model have identified some important changes. The role ofofficials has changed, there are more sources of policy advice, ministersare more policy active and the closed world of civil servants gentlydirecting ministers has gone. However, this does not mean that the oldrelationships have disappeared. The influence of officials on policyremains vital, despite the changing nature of resource-dependencywithin the core executive during the Conservative years. Furthermore,it is crucial to recognise that minister–civil servant relations also varyfrom one department to another. Nevertheless, civil servants still playa significant role in defining the nature of problems, the ‘facts’ and theviability of solutions. Interestingly, much of the advice that officials doprovide is political advice rather than policy advice. Officials are verygood at advising ministers how to obfuscate issues to disarm theOpposition, but the quality of their policy advice is often variable (seeChapter 6).

Nevertheless, both ministers and civil servants continue to payformal lip service to the constitutional model because it is in their self-interest to do so. As we have argued, the power-dependency modelprovides a more convincing description of the relations within thecore executive than the constitutional model. However, we are, inpart, critical of Rhodes’ broader differentiated polity model, largelybecause of its inherent pluralism. Unlike many pluralists, Rhodesrecognises the importance of structural constraints on the actions ofagents. Nevertheless, his differentiated polity model is underpinned bythe core tenet of pluralism: that power in the British political system isdiffused.

It is the implicit pluralistic logic of the differentiated polity modelwith which we wish to take issue. In our view, the interviews we con-ducted suggest that, despite the structural changes in the policyprocess over the last two decades – for example, the introduction ofNext Steps agencies and the greater use of outside consultants andspecial advisers – the crucial actors in the policy process remain thoselocated within departments, i.e. ministers and civil servants. These


two sets of actors continue to act as the guardians of the policyprocess which, in turn, continues to be predominantly top-down,closed, secretive and elitist.

This then leads to the interesting question as to why ministers andcivil servants continue to subscribe to this particular narrow model ofpolicy-making. Ministers and civil servants have continued to protecttheir dominant position in the policy process because it is in theirmutual interest to do so. This is mainly a reflection of a particular viewof democracy that both sets of actors hold. This position can only beunderstood in its historical context, as part of what we referred to inthe introductory chapter as the British political tradition. This traditionadvocates a limited conception of popular representation and a conser-vative notion of responsibility. It is informed by a top-down view ofdemocracy that downplays the importance of participation. Thus,there is virtually no emphasis within the British system on the notionthat the government should be responsive to the population. Instead,ministers and civil servants believe in responsible, strong, government;with its emphasis on the idea that the governing elite should becapable of taking strong, decisive and necessary, even if unpopular,action. It is a top-down view of democracy that asserts that govern-ment knows best. Both ministers and civil servants subscribe to thiselitist, leadership, view of democracy and, therefore, have a sharedinterest in protecting it. So, despite the extent to which the structure,organisation and culture of government departments have changed inthe last two decades, in our view power still remains predominantly-centrally concentrated and justified by a continuing strong Britishpolitical tradition.

8The Departments’ RelationsOutside the Core Executive

In this chapter, we look at relations between the departments and theworld outside Whitehall and Westminster. Of course, the ‘political’world outside the core executive is extensive and therefore we cannotdeal with all aspects of departmental relations. Consequently, we focuson those aspects of that broader world that are most important to usgiven our theoretical concerns. So, we do not examine the relationsbetween our departments and sub-central government in its manyguises, an issue which others have covered (Rhodes 1988). Rather, weconcentrate upon the departments’ relations with interest groups and,to a much lesser extent, with the media and the public.

There are two reasons for the focus on interest groups which takeus back to key issues raised in the introductory chapter. First, interestgroups, and more specifically policy networks, are crucial in contem-porary discussions of governance. To Rhodes, policy networks are animportant feature of the differentiated polity and their role representsa significant aspect of the hollowing out of the British state. Second,interest group relations with government are also fundamentallyimportant for a critical examination of the pluralist model of power.After all, to pluralists, civil society is characterised by divisionsbetween interest groups, not more fundamental differences basedupon gender, class or race. As such, politics is conceptualised in terms of competition between interest groups for influence over government.

While the chapter concentrates upon interest groups it also considersthe departments’ relations with the media and the public. In large part,this is also because the role of both is important for a pluralist concep-tion of power, given that both are seen as crucial in ensuring theaccountability of government, a key notion to a pluralist.

181


So, the main questions raised in this chapter concern the changingrole of interest groups and policy networks in the last 25 years and theextent to which the media and the public have a significant role inchecking the power of government. Once again, in attempting toexplain the changes in interest group/government relations, we shallreturn to the two meta-theoretical issues raised in the introductorychapter and ask what role agents and structures, and institutions andideas played in these changes.

Departments and interest groups

This section is organised around a consideration of a much used, ifcontested, model of interest group/government relations: the policynetwork model (for a sympathetic view, see Marsh and Rhodes 1992a;Marsh, 1998; Marsh and Smith 2000; for a critical view, see Dowding1995). The idea of policy networks is crucial to Rhodes’ notion thatBritain is a differentiated polity. Essentially power is exercised througha series of overlapping networks rather than a hierarchy. As such, inthis section we need to examine the nature and extent of policy net-works in the policy areas covered by our departments and, in particu-lar, the role that government plays in relation to these networks.However, before we can progress, we need briefly to review the policynetwork literature.

The policy network approach

The basic idea of the network’s literature is simple. It is argued thatmuch, some enthusiasts might even say most, policy-making in Britainoccurs as a result of discussions between departments and representa-tives of interest groups in fairly closed networks. This policy networkliterature has been extensively reviewed elsewhere and we do notintend to offer another review here (see Marsh and Smith 2000). Sufficeit to say, that for Marsh and Rhodes (1992a):

• networks exist on a continuum from closed policy communities toopen and flexible issue networks;

• networks are structures of resource dependencies with policy-making occurring through resource exchange between networkmembers;

• the types of networks affect policy outcomes through the ability tocontrol entrants and issues within the network (see Marsh andRhodes 1992a).

The Departments’ Relations Outside the Core Executive 183

We shall use our material to throw light on a series of questions high-lighted in the network literature which are crucially important tobroader discussions of power and governance. These questions are:

• Are policy networks a key feature of British policy-making? • Which interest(s) dominate(s) the policy networks?• To what extent do policy networks affect outcomes?• How and why do networks change?

These questions raise issues concerning both the pattern of governanceand the distribution of power in Britain. If Rhodes’ differentiated polityis accurate we would expect policy networks to be common; to involveexchange relationships between government and interest groups); toreflect the segmented nature of the executive (so different sections ofthe executive will be involved in different interest groups); and not tobe dominated by government interests. If pluralism is an accuratedescription of the British power structure, we would expect no singlegroup or set of interests to be dominant in a series of the policy net-works (i.e. for there to be plurality over space) and the nature of thenetworks to be subject to a great deal of change which would be largelypolitical driven (i.e. for there to be plurality over time). We shall ini-tially address these questions through a consideration of the nature of,and changes in, the relationships between interest groups and govern-ment in each of our four departments.

The pattern of interest group/government relations in the four departments

Obviously, we cannot present a full picture of the relations betweeninterest groups and government across our four departments. We donot have the information or the space to do so. Rather, we begin byoutlining a broad picture of the links, before identifying how theyhave changed over time and, more specifically, the effect of the changeof government in 1997. In the next section, we first assess what theseresults mean for our broader concerns with the pattern of governanceand distribution of power within Britain, before examining explana-tions of the changes.

The overall picture. Our data suggests three broad conclusions. First,there are a significant number of policy networks within the fourdepartments that are rooted in resource exchanges; some are, or were,very tight, although there are probably fewer of those than the mostenthusiastic proponents of the model might suggest. Second, it is


crucial to disaggregate. In this sense there is plurality. There aredifferent patterns both between and within departments. At the sametime, these networks are not unchanging and there has been con-siderable change over time. Third, tight networks, at least, have aninfluence over policy outcomes; indeed that is a crucial aspect of theexchange.

Some relationships between government and interests have beenvery close. Perhaps the best example in the four departments is theHome Office and policing policy. Here, as McLeay (1998: 130) shows,there is a very tight network, well towards the policy community endof the Marsh and Rhodes continuum:

Policing demonstrated stability in relationships, relationshipsderived from actors’ structural positions … Policing policy networkshad continuity of membership; and they had vertical independencebased on shared service delivery and responsibilities. Overall, therehas been a high degree of consensus relating to the primary valuesof policing.

The key actors in this network are the politicians and senior civil ser-vants in the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers(ACPO), but two other actors do play significant roles. Her Majesty’sInspectorate of Constabulary is crucially concerned with issues involv-ing the regulation of the police and the Law Commission providesadvice on legislation. However, other interests occupy a limited role.The Police Federation and the Superintendents’ Association areinvolved in discussions on the conditions of service of police officers,but do not have insider status in relation to policy. As such, they aremuch more likely to use the media to put pressure on the Home Officethan are ACPO; in Grant’s (1978) terms a classic outsider group strat-egy. Non-state actors are noticeable by their absence from the policyformulation process (for limited exceptions see McLeay 1998: 128–9).

There is considerable resource exchange between the Home Officeand ACPO. The Home Office has resources because it controls the leg-islative process, which determines both the criminal law within whichthe police operate and the regulation of the police force. It also con-trols the purse-strings because: ‘(it) advise(s) on the allocation offinances to all the forces, within the Treasury’s budget allocation’(McLeay 1998: 116). On the other hand, ACPO have resources. Theyhave considerable expertise on all aspects of policing which the HomeOffice needs. Perhaps, more importantly, it is the police who deliver


policing; they are, often literally, street-level bureaucrats who cangreatly affect the efficacy of policing policy on the ground. Mostbroadly, as McLeay (1998: 116) emphasises, the doctrine of operationalindependence which underpins British policing means that:

An activist … Home Secretary, despite the persuasive powers of theHome Office, cannot depend upon corporatist-style adherence bythe Chief Constables. Institutionalised decentralisation, police pro-fessionalism and the doctrine of constabulary independence haveworked together to legitimise the autonomy of individual ChiefConstables. This is why the relationship between the Home Office and Chief Officers tends to be co-operative rather than confrontational.

Our interviewees confirmed McLeay’s analysis of the nature of the rela-tionship between the Home Office and ACPO. An ex-PermanentSecretary stressed the importance of chief constables as a source ofinformation for senior civil servants:

[Chief Constables] know people around the country (and) they canring you back and tell you all the facts and they’ve got to be right. Imean if the Home Secretary says things, and they aren’t right, youare in a terrible mess.

He also stressed their role in policy delivery:

We depended entirely on Chief Constables to deliver. The HomeSecretary has a policy, how does he get it translated into action? It’sno good just telling the Chief Constables that’s what they’ve got todo, they won’t do it. And they don’t have to.

The politicians made similar points. So, Merlyn Rees, Labour HomeSecretary in the 1970s, emphasised:

I knew [the Police Federation] but I wouldn’t consult them onpolicy; that didn’t arise. [The superintendents] would write and theywould all expect you to go to their conferences and meetings. Butthe only ones [with] a formal link to officials would be ACPObecause of the way its power had built up.

Michael Howard, who was Home Secretary when the Conservatives leftoffice in 1997, even went as far as to argue:

If I had an idea which I thought was going to reduce crime butACPO said it was not a realistic idea for these reasons then I would


listen carefully to that and probably more carefully than I would tothe officials in the Home Office.

Not surprisingly, this view of the relationship was confirmed by ACPO.One President of ACPO emphasised:

Our committees know which sections of the Home Office areworking in each area and there are a lot of meetings and exchangeof correspondence. That is continuous. The Home Secretary writesto me and keeps me informed and I have meetings with him towhich I take the vice-president. I have direct contact with the HomeSecretary’s office and with the Permanent Secretary, but most withthe police department. We sometimes also form crosscutting taskforces to deal with particular issues, as we did with race relationsand with corruption.

While this relationship was probably the closest, others were similarand, again, all involved clear exchange relations. So, in theDepartment of Energy, particularly before the privatisations, there wereclose relations between the fuels and the various sections of the depart-ment. This closeness was based on an exchange but was also, in part, areflection of the fact that the Department of Energy was small. As such,there was less opportunity to move civil servants around the depart-ment than in departments like the DTI; so individual civil servantsdeveloped particularly close relations with ‘their’ fuels.

The closeness of the relationships was borne out in our interviews.As an example, Nigel Lawson, Energy Secretary between 1981 and1983, argued:

The nuclear division within the Department regarded themselves asalmost evangelists for nuclear power and they had to make the casefor nuclear power within the Department and they hoped that min-isters would more widely. But I don’t think this was resentedbecause other sections were doing similar things.

Similarly, one Grade 2 who served in the 1980s claimed:

The CEGB was very strong; a powerful influence on departmentalthinking. And the contact which the Chairmen of the nationalisedindustries had with the Deputy Secretaries and with the ministerswas actually a very powerful force indeed.


Perhaps most interestingly, a Grade 3 in the department in the 1990semphasised:

The Department of Energy tended obviously to deal with its producerinterests and they were very good at maintaining relationships. In theOil Division you would spend a lot of time talking to the oil compa-nies and they were better organised than the consumer interests. Wedid see the consumer interest a lot throughout electricity privatisation;we were constantly seeing the major energy user councils or theConsumers’ Association or whatever. But there was a well-organisedand fairly well defined group of industries around the Department ofEnergy with whom we needed to have a relationship and I suppose theonly question is whether we did give enough weight to the consumerand the green side of things.

There was a similar pattern in the industry sections of the DTI. Here,until 1987, particular sections of the department had responsibility forcertain industries. This inevitably meant that there were close rela-tions, with these sections sponsoring the interests of these industries inthe department in much the same way as the sections in theDepartment of Energy sponsored the interests of the various fuels.Once again, the basis of the relationship was an exchange; the indus-tries needed the ear of government, while the department neededinformation and co-operation from the companies with which theywere dealing. As we argue below, even when the Conservative govern-ment abolished the sponsoring sections, the close relations persistedbecause the exchange benefited both sides.

The pattern of relations with interests in the trade section of the DTIis similar. Some industries have close contacts, although one or twocivil servants on the trade side emphasise an absence, rather than anexcess, of lobbying. So, one Grade 2 argued:

We get lobbied quite a lot by the textile industry and a bit from otherswhen particular problems arise. If anything I’m always surprised by thelack of interest that industry takes, rather than feeling that I am beingexcessively badgered. I think they should actually take more interest.

Obviously, there was close and continuing contact with those indus-tries, such as textiles or cars, which were constantly concerned withtrade issues. However, few contacts were continuous or institution-alised. The department would approach the industry concerned if aparticular set of international negotiations were coming up:


(We would approach the industry) either directly or through thedomestic side of the Department. If we had direct lines out alreadythen we would use those, if we didn’t know the industry for somereason we would ask the other side; for instance on telecomswhere the home side of the DTI, because it is the regulator, hasvery close contacts with the industry, we would tend to gothrough them.

Trade has particularly close links with the City. One retired Grade 1argued: ‘you had lots to do with the City or the main City associationsand a certain amount to do with the CBI, but they tended not to be asevident’. Many of these contacts were interpersonal and informal.Indeed, one retired DTI Grade 2 was particularly clear about the natureof the exchange relationship involved:

You would know all the major merchant banks in the City; youwould be on Christian name terms with all the people who wereconcerned there. It was essential for us to do that because theywould bring business to you and merchant banks were there to oilthe wheels for a particular contract and they would come along tous and say ‘Look I’ve this one going, will you give cover?’ because ifwe gave them a guarantee then they could take that guarantee anduse it as collateral for raising money.

Most links are with economic interests, although the extent of contactswith non-economic interests varies between the different sections oftrade. One contemporary Grade 7 dealing with tariff policy reportedlittle contact:

I have very little consultation with lobby groups. Partly because theNGOs [non-governmental organisations] we come across tend notto be much interested in trade policy. They might be interested inthe environment, they might be interested in slave labour, butwhether you should reduce tariffs on cars doesn’t really have muchappeal to them.

However, the situation is different in a colleague’s section of thedepartment. Here, a failure to consult with environmental interests onthe multilateral agreement on investment led to major problems.These environmental groups were incensed and used the media to pub-licise their case. As the civil servant indicated, the likely consequence is


that there will be wider consultation with NGOs in future: ‘not to agreewith them but at least to engage them in discussion’.

In the four departments studied, the links are closest where anobvious exchange relationship is involved and either economic or pro-fessional interests are crucial. This does not mean that other groupshave no contacts, but they are not as integrated into the policy-makingprocess. Elsewhere, interest groups were consulted. Consultation listswere almost always extensive and if an interest group wants to talk to adepartment it will almost always be seen. However, such lists and suchconsultations are largely cosmetic. Groups that have few resources toexchange have limited access and less influence. As we shall see below,this was particularly the case during the Conservative years, when con-sultation, particularly formal consultation, decreased. However, thosegroups with significant influence over the delivery of policy, a keyresource, retained their position in networks.

The DSS provides a clear example of this pattern. So, in an area likepensions there will be close contacts with the organisation represent-ing the pensions industry and fairly regular contacts with organisationslike the National Pensioners’ Convention and Age Concern. Theselatter type of cause organisations will always be seen by civil servants,if they are viewed as being representative, because departments need toknow the consumers’, in this case the pensioners’, view of issues andproposed legislative changes. However, they do not have the privilegedaccess of the pension companies who possess more resources toexchange with government. It is the pension companies who sell andoperate private pension provision and this is crucial, particularly if agovernment is attempting to reduce the cost of state provision. In theDSS, as elsewhere, control of such resources ensures access andinfluence.

Changes over time in policy networks

The nature of relations within networks clearly changes over time. Inthis section, we shall concentrate on the changes that occurred after1979 and, subsequently, those that have been taking place since theelection of the Blair government in 1997, because they are particu-larly interesting. However, it is worth emphasising that networkchange does not only occur with a change of government.Individuals can make a difference; so a new minister, senior civilservant or interest group leader can change the operation of thenetwork.


The Conservatives and the end of consultation Many argued that one ofthe key characteristics of the Thatcherite governing style was its atti-tude to consultation. To many, the postwar consensus had been basedupon consultation and compromise with key interests. Indeed, somewent as far as to suggest that Britain’s relative economic decline was, inlarge part, a result of over-governance; that in responding to pressurefrom particular interests, British governments had intervened toowidely and at too great a cost (King 1975). Of course, much of this lit-erature is focused explicitly, or more often implicitly, on the role of thetrade unions. In this vein, the unions were seen to be overwhelminglypowerful before 1979, but cut down to size by the Thatcher govern-ment. However, the point has also been made more generally. So,according to Kavanagh (1987: 9), Thatcher produced: ‘a set of policiesdesigned to produce a strong state and a government strong enough toresist the selfish claims of pressure groups’. Consequently, it has beenargued that the Thatcher years saw the collapse of existing policy net-works. Is this view confirmed in relation to the networks in these fourdepartments?

There was certainly a decrease in consultation in the Conservativeyears. The exclusion of the trade unions was the most prominentchange and we picked this up in our interviews. As a civil servant whohad worked in the Department of Employment when Norman Tebbitwas Secretary of State argued:

When I went into the Department of Employment the culture reallywas that they were the sponsoring department of the trade unionmovement. If the trade union movement didn’t want anything tohappen then it would not happen, even if there was a Conservativegovernment and a Conservative Secretary of State. Now all thatchanged rapidly with the arrival of Norman Tebbit and it was quiteamazing how the civil servants changed.

However, the pattern was more general. All the networks changed, butsome more than others. It really all depended on the nature of theexchange relationships involved and how they had changed over time.The policy communities were very resistant to, although not immunefrom, change. So, the policing policy network remained tight (McLeay1998). The Conservatives were committed to a law and order agenda,which meant that they were sympathetic to many of the interests ofACPO. Michael Howard, as Secretary of State, particularly valued thelink, which reinforced his own policy interests. However, even here


there were changes when the government sought to exercise morecontrol over the direction of policing, in particular, increasingefficiency and holding down costs (McLeay 1998)

As we said earlier, individual ministers or interest group leaders canaffect the process and extent of consultation. An ACPO official madethe general point:

[The Home Office/ACPO relationship] is not a constant one simplybecause there are so many personalities involved. Ministers changeand so do ACPO Presidents and the relationship between the HomeSecretary and the ACPO President is crucial.

An executive from NACRO was more specific:

NACRO has always had, to some extent, a structured relation withthe Home Office … Overall, we have found that the Home Officeover the years has not had much difficulty with being criticised byus; constructive criticism. That was true right until Michael Howard.That was the first time NACRO really had a hard time on the policycampaigning side.

The changes in the DTI were also revealing. Here, as we saw earlier, theConservatives abolished the sponsoring sections system. This had littleeffect on relations where there was still resources to exchange. So, tothe extent that the department still needed information, contactsremained close. As one senior DTI official said:

(When the change occurred) I was in the vehicles part of theDepartment. It was very odd because it did not actually make anydifference. It was just that the names were changed. It sounds like the tired old bureaucratic perception that ministers come and go and change little except the labels, but in that particularcase there really was a bit of that. We had to move from beingcalled the Vehicle Division to being called the Vehicle MarketsDivision and all the other sponsorship divisions changed in thatway. There was less emphasis on financial assistance and moreemphasis on helping industry to help itself but I do not think itwas really a big deal because there were always parts of theDepartment where there were pretty solid things that had to bedone by government.


However, the change in economic and industrial policy had a muchclearer effect. As one retired DTI Grade 2 put it:

I think that as the 1980s went on the Department became drier anddrier and some of the contacts dried up because there was no futurein them. What was the point in building a relationship with busi-nessman X if there was nothing he could do for you or you could dofor him.

Thus, there appears to have been greater change in the industry sectionof the department, more because of the change in ideology and policydirection, than because of the changes in departmental structure;although, of course, the two are related. In the trade section, most ofthe exchange imperatives persisted because the government wasstrongly committed to promoting and defending Britain’s interestswithin the European Union and GATT.

If there were structural changes within the DTI that affected net-works, change was much greater in Energy. Here, two factors broughtmajor change: the privatisation process and the subsequent abolitionof the department. The privatisations of electricity and gas dominatedthe Department of Energy in the 1980s. The managers of the nation-alised industries were closely involved in the privatisation process. So,for example, Hoopes’ (1996) study of oil privatisation indicates theimportant role that British Petroleum, the British National OilCompany and the British Gas Corporation played in the evolution ofpolicy in this area.

Of course, the change did break up the links that existed prior to pri-vatisation because the exchange relationships changed significantly.The department was no longer responsible for the industries and thekey relationships for the industries are now with the regulatorymachinery; although, of course, the legislative framework is still set bythe government. The privatisation of electricity also had a particulareffect on the position of the nuclear industry. It forced more accuratefigures on the cost of electricity generated by the nuclear programmeinto the open for the first time and this contributed to increased scepti-cism about the future of nuclear power.

The privatisations also heralded the end of the department, which,as we saw earlier, was abolished in 1994. Most of the department’sresidual work was moved to the DTI, but a limited amount, mainly todo with energy efficiency and related issues, went to the Department of


the Environment. This change also had an effect on the networks. Asone Grade 3, dealing with the energy industry in the DTI, put it:

The merger of the Department of Energy into the DTI back in theearly 1990s allowed us to move people in who were not as familiarwith, that is not as bedded into, a particular technology. As such,they could ask some of the more naive questions and get to gripswith the issues.

The movement of energy efficiency issues into the Department of theEnvironment also affected the relationships with interest groups. Onesenior official who moved from Energy to Environment highlightedhow the exchange relationships changed because of the differentculture in the DoE and the way in which they perceived the energyefficiency issue:

I suppose the main thing that changed was that the Department ofthe Environment had a much more pro-active political view of theEnergy Efficiency Office than the Department of Energy. TheDepartment of Energy came at it very much by asking: ‘what are themarket failures and what is it sensible to do?’ In contrast, theDepartment of the Environment thought: ‘this is a good thing,therefore we must promote it whatever way we can and we mustfight for the necessary resources and power’. It felt rather like youhad become part of a lobby group, you weren’t giving advice toministers about the economics of it all, you were saying it was agood thing and it was made clear to you that you should promotethe cause. Of course, the Department of the Environment, havinglarge expenditure programmes, had much more ability to putmoney into the area. You just shaved off the odd ten million, sayoff the housing programme, and put it into the Energy EfficiencyOffice. In addition, because the Treasury had made a complete messof the imposition of VAT on domestic energy, they had a stronginterest in putting money into the energy efficiency side … So, thatwas certainly a culture change.

Despite this, perhaps the biggest changes in the process of consultationand the pattern of networks occurred in the DSS. Here, the exchangerelationships were always less clear as, on the whole, the department isdelivering benefits to the poor and disparate. Consequently, closedpolicy communities did not develop. The Thatcher, and indeed the


Major, governments were generally unsympathetic to the aims of inter-est groups in this field; after all, most were campaigning for changeswhich would involve increased social provision. This point is easilymade if we compare the incoming Blair government with its predeces-sors, which we do in the next section. However, one senior DSS civilservant (Grade 7) expressed a common, if cynical, view among those inthe department:

I’m not sure that towards the end they were getting much qualityadvice from anywhere. They seemed driven by the leader page ofthe Daily Mail … I’m sure that does an injustice to them in that wehad some good and thoughtful ministers who did listen quite a lotto welfare groups but policy tended to be what backbenchers wouldlike.

Once again, it is worth emphasising that individuals can affect net-works. So, one senior DSS official argued:

Lilley was a very inward looking character. He was not interested inand did not consult or care about the Department’s relationshipswith the traditional lobby groups.

There were changes in networks in the Conservative years.Consultation was reduced. However, where clear exchange relation-ships persisted, networks remained, but not unchanged. Overall, thegroups who maintained insider status were most likely to be economicinterests or professional groups because they retained the resourcesthat ensured an exchange relationship with government. At the sametime, there was no simple causal relationship between a change in gov-ernment and a change in the networks. Ideological change and, partic-ularly, the commitment to New Right economic policies, reduced links,especially in the industry section of the DTI. Structural change alsoplayed a role; so the privatisations and the abolition of the Departmentof Energy had a clear effect on relations between the government andthe energy industry. At the same time, the views and actions of indi-vidual ministers, like Howard or Lilley, were also important.

The Labour government and a return of consultation? There seems littledoubt that there was both a major increase in consultation andchanges in who was consulted after the Labour government came topower. Almost without exception our interviewees confirmed this


view. The change was probably most notable in the DSS. One Grade 3in the DSS stressed the greater consultation:

[The current Government] wants to bring [interest groups] in at amuch earlier stage. Previously, we’ve generally had more of an ideaand presented options, but now we are asking for everyone’s viewsregardless.

Another Grade 5’s response dealt with the changes in who was consulted:

One of the main differences between this government and the lastis that we now have more contact with (interest groups). I thinkthe last government did not welcome the voluntary organisationsand, of course, they were not supportive of what the governmentwas trying to do. This lot has relied on those voluntary organisa-tions because they have been briefing them for the last eighteenyears. I think their relationship with the people who used to briefthem is difficult because they are now in government and they aregoing to have to take forward (changes) which do not necessarilytally with what they were doing before. But there is greateremphasis on presentation and selling policy under this govern-ment and I think that will involve greater contact with the volun-tary associations.

A DSS official concurred:

There is clearly a fundamental difference between this and the pre-vious administration. The previous one really did not consult at alland so one might say they were more decisive. It was easier to getclear steers from them, but the current administration clearly has alarge constituency out there that they are keen to keep on board.

The increase in consultation has not been confined to the DSS,although the contrast with the previous administration is most starkthere. So, one of the civil servants in the DTI dealing with energy madea similar point:

[The difference] is fairly clear-cut. Pre-election we had very littlecontact with … the unions associated with the nuclear industry …Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (or) local politicians from areas


surrounding the nuclear plants … Post-election I’ve been in contactwith them all on a one-to-one basis.

Not surprisingly, this view was confirmed by the interest groups. So,for example, an executive from Gingerbread claimed:

I’ve had two meetings with the Head of Policy and they havephoned up and asked for another one. They want us on board andare prepared to put some effort in. Whereas previously, under theTories, it was always us pushing at the door. So there is a difference;two years ago we simply wouldn’t have been in this position.

These quotes suggest some of the reasons for the change. Clearly, theLabour government has different policy objectives and is more com-mitted to consultation. However, at the same time, it has debts to payto the groups that serviced it in opposition; so we may expect consulta-tion with such groups to continue for some time. Part of the currentexchange relationship involves access in return for services rendered inthe past.

Policy networks and policy outcomes

Of course, the existence of a close network does not inevitably meanthat it influences policy outcomes; that is an empirical question. Wehave to establish whether, and in what ways, a particular networkaffects policy outcomes. It is clear that networks can affect outcomesbecause if a group is a member of a tight policy community that mem-bership gives it a crucial resource: privileged access to the policy-making process. However, this resource has to be used; it does not bydefinition give the interest group influence over policy. We need toestablish the resources that network members have and how they usethem, in order to assess how important a group’s membership of thenetwork is in affecting its influence over policy.

To answer this question satisfactorily, we would need much moreinformation on the resource exchanges between government and inter-est groups than we have. Indeed, there must be considerable doubt asto whether sufficiently detailed material would ever be available, giventhat few details are available about the private negotiations involved intight networks. As such, all we can do here is briefly illustrate how net-works can affect outcomes. We shall do this by returning to the case ofpolicing policy. Obviously, one case cannot be generalised, but it doesshow us how interest groups affect policy in tight networks.


As we saw there is a tight network in policing policy based upon aclear exchange relationship between the Home Office and ACPO.ACPO’s role in the network gives them privileged access to the policy-making process. So, McLeay (1998: 118–19) points out that ACPO isrepresented on over 60 groups chaired by government departmentsand on a number of Home Office Standing Committees. The CentralConference of Chief Constables also meets in secret twice a year withHome Office civil servants chaired by the Permanent Secretary to‘discuss issues of common concern to the police service’.

McLeay also emphasises that ACPO effectively uses that position toinfluence policy. So, when the Sheehy Committee recommendedmajor changes in the wages, structure and conditions of the policeforce in 1993, the government bowed to pressure from ACPO, backedby the Police Federation, and rejected many of the recommendations(Benyon 1993: 53–4). They also had a significant influence on the 1994Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which, despite strong opposi-tion from civil liberties groups, gave more public order powers to thepolice and constrained the ‘right to silence’ (McLeay 1998: 123). Thelatter had been a particular long-term goal of ACPO.

Of course, ACPO’s privileged access doesn’t inevitably give theminfluence over policy outcomes. As such, there are occasions on whichthey lose out. So, in the mid-1990s, the government’s attempt to gaingreater control in policing resulted in the Police and Magistrates’Courts Act, which allows the Home Secretary to set annual objectivesfor police forces. This was opposed by ACPO, but pushed through bythe Home Office. The point here is that ultimately the government hasthe power to pass legislation, but in doing so it must weigh the per-ceived advantages of such new legislation against the problems whichmay be caused if ACPO members fail to co-operate.

Interest groups, governance and power

Here, we first assess what the changing pattern of interest group/gov-ernment relations in the last 25 years tells us about both the changingpatterns of governance and the distribution of power in Britain.Subsequently, we look at explanations of those changing patterns ofgovernance.

Changing patterns of governance and the distribution of power

Our research suggests a number of conclusions. First, as we emphasisedabove, policy networks do play a significant role in British politics,


although it is important not to overemphasise that role and we need todisaggregate. Second, although these networks involve exchange rela-tionships, in most cases, and certainly in those cases where publicinterest or cause groups are involved, the government actors controlthe more important resources; so it is an unequal exchange. This is animportant point. The existence of networks in most cases is dependenton government (see Smith 1993) and this was highlighted by theConservative administration which dispensed with a number of net-works. However, where groups such as doctors or the police controlimplementation and have high legitimacy, government is heavilydependent on those networks. Consequently, closed policy communi-ties are dominated by a limited number of powerful interests, havemore influence over policy and are more resistant to change. In ourview, these findings support a critical view of both the differentiatedpolity model and the pluralist model.

Policy networks exist because an institutionalised relationshipbetween interest groups and government is almost inevitable if eachhas resources that the other needs. Obviously, when it comes to policy-making, the government always possesses resources; after all they arethe legitimate source of policy. They also exercise crucial regulatoryfunctions. In addition, they control economic resources, includinggrants and subsidies. As such, the crucial question is: do interest groupscontrol resources which government needs and for which they arewilling to exchange access and influence?

The answer to that question is clearly yes, but disaggregation iscrucial. There were, and are, significant differences in the patterns ofaccess both across and within departments. There is also variationover time. We did identify some close networks but they were notcommon. As such, in so far as the differentiated polity model impliesthe existence of strong and persistent interest groups, and we areaware that it need not do so, then our study does not confirm thatpattern.

Perhaps more importantly, our analysis suggests that governmentwas the most important actor in the vast majority of networks. In mostcases, the distribution of resources between government and interestgroups is an asymmetric one. Government has authority and can makelaw. It also controls important financial resources which groups need.Of course, this is not to say that interest groups have no resources, butour study shows that in many areas, particularly areas of social policy,government has no desperate need of the resources that these cause orpromotional groups possess. This does not mean that they are not con-


sulted or that they have no influence, but, as we saw in relation to thepattern of consultation in the DSS during the Thatcher years, govern-ment controls, and can effectively cut off, access. Here, our point is notthat policy networks are unimportant, but rather that Rhodes perhapsgives too much emphasis to them as a feature of policy-making and asa check on the power of the central state.

Our next point follows almost inevitably. We accept that there isplurality. Different groups do have access to different networks; no onegroup is present across a variety of networks. However, in our viewthere are clear patterns. It is the economic and professional groups whohave privileged access and they, plus government, who dominateclosed networks. We could find little evidence of consistent tradeunion presence in key networks, certainly post-1979. Similarly, as weargued above, while ‘cause’ or ‘promotional’ groups were consulted,they were not involved in close relationships. There is a self-perpetuat-ing element here. The groups that are privileged in tight policy net-works are, by definition, those who already possess resources, while, ofcourse, policy network membership itself becomes a key resource.Networks and plurality do not confirm pluralism. Power seems concen-trated in the hands of a limited number of interests.

Explaining change in the role of networks and the pattern of governance

It is one thing to identify changes in the role of networks, but anotherto explain those changes. How far is change driven by actors, whetherindividuals or governments? To what extent do exogenous changes inthe broader economic and political environment lead to changes in thepolicy networks and in policy outcomes? How far is change shaped byideas?

Agents clearly affected the nature of networks. So, first the electionof a Conservative government in 1979 and subsequently Labour’s elec-tion in 1997 changed the extent and nature of the DSS’s relations withsocial policy groups. At the same time, individual ministers also matterto some extent. Certainly, a number of DSS civil servants argued thatPeter Lilley was particularly reluctant to consult with the social policygroups. It is also worth emphasising that agents are likely to have mostinfluence in loose networks because in such networks there are not thesame imperatives to exchange as in policy communities.

Although networks are influenced by agents, the economic andpolitical context in which they are located also plays a role. So, if thecontext changes, the network changes. Our research provides ample


examples of this interaction. Both the economic context and the par-ticular economic policies pursued by the Conservative governmentaffected networks. Three examples are illustrative. First, Hoopes (1996)shows how the increased role of market forces within the oil industryfrom the late 1970s shaped the British government’s oil strategies andled both to the break-up of the policy network and the privatisation ofthe industry. Second, even the tight policing network was affected bythe increased emphasis on managerialism in the public sector. As wesaw, McLeay argues that the Conservative government’s managerialismwas an important element in its attempt to exercise more control ofthe policing policy network. Third, their emphasis on cutting publicexpenditure and the corollary reductions in welfare provision ensuredthat the DSS’s relations with interest groups concerned with improvingwelfare provision significantly worsened.

The effect of the political context on networks was also evident. Wehave already seen that a significant change occurred in the networksand patterns of consultation as a result of the change in government in1997. At the same time, change in the structure of government canalso affect networks. In this way, the abolition of the Department ofEnergy changed the relations between the departments and the fuels,although of course policy change, in the shape of the privatisations,also played a role here. More specifically, the shift of the EnergyEfficiency Unit into the Department of the Environment, rather thanthe DTI, when Energy was abolished, clearly changed relations withinthat field. The DoE was more sympathetic to energy conservation andlinks with the interest groups became closer. In the DTI, theConservative government’s decision to end the system of sponsoringsections did mean that relations between the department and industrybecame less formal or institutionalised, although the links remainedbecause both sides needed one another; there was still a clear exchangerelationship involved.

Ideas also clearly affected networks. The Conservative government wascommitted to much of the rhetoric of the ‘New Right’. In the economic field, this involved an acceptance of neo-classical economicsand a belief that trade unions were a massive constraint on the operationof the market. In the social sphere, the emphasis was on responsibilitiesrather than rights; if there was no such thing as society then individualsmust take responsibility for their own lives. These dominant discoursesaffected networks and policy outcomes. As such, there was little point inconsulting unions or social policy interest groups if they were regarded aspart of the problem rather than part of the solution.


However, in each of these cases, we must acknowledge that the rela-tionships are interactive. So, the election of a Labour government maychange the political structure, but the effect that this has on networksdepends on the attitudes and behaviour of ministers. In turn, thatbehaviour in changing the network structure provides the contextwithin which future agents act. Similarly, after a set of ideas becomesdominant and helps shape the network structure, that network struc-ture provides the context within which other, competing ideas emerge;perhaps successfully challenging the existing view or perhaps failingbecause the combination of a tight policy network and a dominant setof ideas is difficult to dislodge.

One other point is important here, particularly in the context ofrecent debates on policy networks. While networks affect policy out-comes, outcomes also affect networks (Marsh and Smith 2000). Forexample, as we argued earlier, economic policy set a crucial contextthat reduced consultation in a variety of policy areas. More specifically,in Energy, privatisation changed the nature of the relations betweengovernment and the fuel industries. The relationship became less symbiotic as the nature of the exchange relationship changed.Government no longer had direct responsibility for the industries; assuch, each side needed the other less. In addition, as far as the indus-tries were concerned, their crucial relationship became the one withthe regulator. Similarly, in the DTI, the increased dryness of economicpolicy meant the Department had little to offer industry, so consulta-tion was superfluous.

Departments, the media and public opinion

The idea of pluralist democracy focuses attention upon the role ofinterest groups, and to a lesser extent parties, in keeping governmentrepresentative and upon the legislature, interest groups, the media and,to some extent, the public in keeping government accountable. Theissues involved in that view are far too broad for us to deal with satis-factorily here. However, we will examine the relationship betweendepartments, the media and public opinion. In particular, we focusupon how departments respond to the media and upon the constraintswhich public opinion place upon policy-making, especially, althoughnot exclusively, in the Home Office.

The role of the media in politics has greatly expanded in the last 30 years. As one Cabinet Office official said: ‘in 1965 there were about


9 news broadcasts a day, now there are 49 an hour!’ The same official also stressed the extent of the contact departments now havewith the media. He pointed out: ‘In a year, the Home Office willhandle 175 000 media inquiries, host 200 major media events, givehundreds of interviews and issue at least 800 press notices.’ For thatreason, the Home Office has a fully equipped broadcasting studio withfibre-optic links to broadcasters. Among our departments, the HomeOffice is the one with most contact with the media. As one senior civilservant who had served there said: ‘the business of the Home Office iscrisis management. We had to be well prepared. People in the sleepierdepartments did not have that capacity.’ Nevertheless, all departmentsare increasingly concerned with their public relations image and thegrowth of technology, together with the demands of an ever-largermedia, has had a significant effect on their work.

Perhaps the key change in the 1990s has been that departments arenow much more concerned with how a policy will ‘play’ in the mediaand to the public when they are developing it. As one Grade 3 in theDSS said:

The view is that the presentation of policy should form part of theevolution of policy. It should be there right from the start – ‘Whatis it going to look like?’ This differs from the past when youdeveloped your policy and then you worked out how you wouldpresent it.

In his view, this was a development which owed a great deal tochanges in the media, but which had been significantly speeded upwhen Labour came to power in 1997; they were much more committedto presenting a coherent, positive image. In this context, it is perhapsnot surprising that many ministers in the Labour government havespin-doctors located in their departments whose primary responsibilityis the presentation of policy (see Kavanagh and Seldon 1999).

During the Conservative administrations, different ministers had dif-ferent public relations strategies. For example, Tony Newton at the DSSwas concerned to keep issues out of the news, believing that mediaattention could turn relatively mundane matters into potential politi-cal time bombs. Similarly, Peter Lilley confided that at the DSS: ‘I wasmore aware that I had to use the media and that I had to be careful’because in Social Security ‘quite sensible policies, when they interactwith hard cases, can get Social Security Ministers involved in a terriblefuss.’ Lilley would always include his press officer in policy discussions


because ‘he was very good at advising me on how things would beseen, so I could plan the media coverage.’

Nevertheless, it is in the Home Office where the media and thepublic have most impact in a number of ways. First, it is rare for aserving Home Secretary not to have his own agenda impacted on insome way by a high-profile media story. As Willie Whitelaw observed(1989: 161):

A Home Secretary is particularly exposed to sudden and totallyunexpected storms. It is truly said that he can go to bed at nightwith a clear sky as far as Home Affairs are concerned and wake upthe next morning with a major crisis on his hands. Worst of all,many of these particular events permit no simple solution andprovide the press with marvellous copy.

For example, the last ten years of Conservative government witnessedDouglas Hurd and the Hungerford massacre, David Waddington andthe Strangeways riot, Kenneth Baker and dangerous dogs, JamieBulger’s murder and Ken Clarke and, finally, the Dunblane tragedy andMichael Howard. Each case reveals the causal relationship betweenemotive stories surfacing in the media and the pressure HomeSecretaries then face to be seen to take quick, decisive and effectiveaction. The Home Secretary, probably more than most Cabinet minis-ters is at the mercy of events over which he or she can have little or nocontrol. They are often placed in a position in which they are simplyreactive. David Waddington was clear about the repercussions of theStrangeways breakout:

We were sailing merrily on with the demands of the BroadcastingBill and the Criminal Justice Bill when Strangeways blew up and thishad awful implications for my career and for the future of prisons.We acted in the right way, as the press got bored after the first fewweeks, but it was humiliating seeing those pictures in the papers.

Although Waddington did not resign over Strangeways, his ministerialcareer and his Home Office policy initiatives were effectively destroyedby the incident, which also demonstrates the impotence of HomeSecretaries in the face of events over which they have little control.

At another level the need to respond to media pressure, often withthe introduction of swift policy measures, sometimes leads to poorlydrafted and ill-conceived legislative packages. One official referred to


this process as an ‘operational spasm’ which regularly occurred in theHome Office. This was the case with the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act,despite Kenneth Baker’s claim in an interview that: ‘This was one ofthe best pieces of legislation I introduced’ (see also Baker 1993: 436).The majority of his officials who worked on the Bill did not share thisview. They were distinctly unhappy with what subsequently proved tobe an almost impossible Bill to implement and enforce. As one HomeOffice official commented:

The dangerous dogs issue was interesting, as for ministers it is adifficult department in which to be, as you never know what isgoing to be thrown at you. Nor do you know what the public reac-tion is going to be. In my experience, Home Secretaries normallyhave two choices and the way they go depends on their personal-ity. Something happens and there is a call for a response and youare either the sort of person who will sit tight and let it blow overyou, or you reach out and say that something needs to be doneimmediately. Kenneth Baker was not the sort of person to sit backand say how terrible that it was that these things happened. Whatfollowed went down in Whitehall folklore as ‘infamously bad leg-islation’.

Another official involved in drafting the Act was even more scathing:

We had a rash of really nasty incidents usually involving childrenand unpleasant dogs like Rottweilers and, in the end, poor old Bakerhad to do something. It was that sort of syndrome and the resultwas that we cooked up a bill at very short notice. It raised all sorts ofghastly administrative problems about how to actually enforce theproposed controls on the dog-owners. It was pretty bad, poor legisla-tion because it was done in such a rush. The Home Office in mytime probably had an emergency bill in more sessions than not.Now that’s unusual and something most departments do not haveto face.

Douglas Hurd, reflecting on the media response to the Hungerfordmassacre, appreciated the problems which crisis management, followedby hurried policy-making, can produce:

I think there is a real problem for Home Secretaries, the example forme being the Firearms Act after the Hungerford massacre. The legis-


lation was not instant, it took us a while, but it became perfectlyclear as it proceeded through Parliament that it was defective andthat officials simply did not know enough about guns. DouglasHogg and I sifted through the policy proposals, but it quicklybecame obvious that they were factually inadequate and we had tomake quite a lot of amendments simply to bring the policy in linewith the facts. I learnt something from that and, at the time, I wascertainly under pressure.

Crises that blow up in society and urgently require the Home Secretaryto respond in some way, place the ministers under immense pressure,further exacerbated by the effects of emotive media coverage.

Some Home Secretaries have perceived it was important to provide apositive, or at least sympathetic, image/response to the media abouttheir department. As one of Roy Jenkins’ senior officials noted:

Jenkins was concerned about presentation, as was clear from theway he used his private office in order to become more informed onwhat was going on around the Department and on the politicalagenda. His own political agenda, in terms of style as well as policy,was quite a radical change, and this was illustrated in the way thepublic relations office and the press officer became much more pow-erful figures and started to come along to departmental meetings.Thus, during the 1960s, the Department became more conscious ofits profile regarding presentation to the outside world.

Michael Howard provides an interesting, if perhaps extreme, exampleof the manner in which a minister can be affected by the media. Heclaimed that, because he had a clear, ideologically informed agenda,something which was unusual in a Home Secretary, he, unlike his pre-decessors, was not influenced by the vicissitudes of media-relatedstories:

I was not deterred by unfavourable publicity or potentially media-unfriendly decisions. I did not respond to that pressure which wasone of the ways in which I was different. Of course, one of thethings you have to know in the Home Office if you’re going tochange things is that it is a high-risk department. But I felt it wasessential that things were changed and if that meant doing thingsthat meant I would get a lot of criticism, which of course I did, Idecided right from the start that I could not let that deter me.


Because if I did, I would not dare tackle the things I felt needed tackling.

In contrast, the majority of senior officials who worked with MichaelHoward argued that he was the most media-driven Home Secretaryunder whom they had served. This view was encapsulated in thecomment of one of his officials:

All Home Secretaries are more reactive to public opinion and themedia than in other Cabinet posts. A Home Secretary cannot buthelp be reactive to public opinion and, indeed, today there is morepublic opinion than there ever used to be. However, of the thirtyyears I spent in the Home Office, Howard was far and away the mostmedia-oriented minister I ever worked under. If he saw a relatedarticle in the press, he almost immediately felt the need to respondto it in whatever way.

Our analysis indicates that the impact of the media on ministers anddepartments today, compared to 25 years ago, has significantly esca-lated. The media is omnipresent and ministers are much more con-scious of its role and influence. For this reason, departments arecrucially concerned about how issues or policies will ‘play’ in themedia and to the public. As such, departments are now much betterorganised in their dealing with the media and ‘spin-doctoring’ hasbecome an accepted, if not respectable, profession. Of course, there aresignificant differences between departments in the extent of their con-tacts with the media and, perhaps more importantly, in the way inwhich the media shapes issues and affects policy. The Home Office isparticularly affected. Certainly, one of the essential prerequisites of asuccessful Home Secretary is an ability to be sensitised/responsive tothe demands presented by the media.

Under the New Labour government concern with media presenta-tion and public opinion has developed even further. There has been amuch more systematic attempt to co-ordinate media presentation.According to Franklin (2001: 134):

Centralizing communications at Number 10 under the control ofthe Prime Minister’s press secretary has been the key priority inLabour’s communications strategy. The intention is to establish thegovernment as the ‘primary definer’ in media discussion of policy,to ensure the consistency of the government line and to minimize


the profile of any dissenting voices. Central control is certainly strictbut effective.

Does all this mean that governments are responsive to public opinion,or that public opinion, perhaps through the media, acts as a check onthe power of the executive, as the pluralist model would suggest?Certainly, it is clear that public opinion can affect government policy.We emphasised examples taken from the concerns of the Home Office.Yet, even in agricultural policy where there is a closed policy commu-nity, environmental groups have managed to harness media andpublic opinion in opposition to genetically modified (GM) foods,against the interests of agricultural producers.

However, in our view it would be a mistake to overestimate suchdevelopments. Most departments make policy in an environmentmarked by secrecy where there is little media interest. Of course, ifthere is a miners’ strike or a massacre, a great deal of public, or morespecifically media, attention is turned on the relevant department andits policy-making. Nevertheless, this is the exception, rather than therule, and most policy-making takes place within departments insulatedfrom media and public pressure.

Conclusion

The concept of policy networks has become an increasingly domi-nant paradigm for understanding both the nature of state–interestgroup relationships and the processes of governance. Our research,however, suggests a need for caution and further investigation. In anumber of policy areas policy networks were neither important norstable. This is not to suggest a high degree of pluralism but the con-tinuing closed nature of the British core executive and the fact thatofficials still tend not to rely on outsiders for policy advice. In highlytechnical fields like social security for instance, where interest groupsare generally weak, the main source of information is the depart-ment. Consequently, the DSS is not dependent on interest groups foreither the making or delivering of policy. A dependence of this typedid occur between the Labour opposition and interest groups becauseLabour lacked the resources of officials and so developed policy withinterest groups. Consequently, in the early years of the Labouradministration there was some dependence on interest groups but, asthe government became established, it started to distance itself frompressure groups.


Where there are close relationships it tends, as the established liter-ature suggests, to be when the government needs either legitimacy,information or assistance with implementation. Nevertheless, thesetypes of relationships are relatively rare; health, the police and agriculture until the mid-1980s being the most obvious candidates.Consequently, we would suggest that contrary to the differentiatedpolicy model the existence of policy networks is asymmetric anddepends foremost on the interests and actions of state actors. Seldom,if ever, is it non-state groups that dictate the nature and policies ofpolicy networks.

9The Role of Europe

Many authors now argue that the British state has been ‘hollowed out’. Inparticular, it is suggested that power has moved ‘upwards’ in two senses.Most obviously, it is contended that power is moving from Whitehall andWestminster to Brussels. At the same time, it is argued that this is occur-ring within the context of a broader process of economic globalisation(see Cerny 1990; Held et al. 1999). In this view, these two processes, polit-ical and economic, have significantly reduced the power of British centralgovernment, so that the core executive and the departments are increas-ingly structurally constrained (see Rhodes 2000; Rose 2000). Our mainaim in this chapter is to examine the degree to which departments areinvolved in, and constrained by, the EU. At the same time, we willcomment upon the main claims of the globalisation thesis, in so far as itimpacts upon our concerns. We shall question the extent to which theBritish state has been hollowed out upwards, in particular emphasisingthat British central government departments engage with and are affectedby the EU to differing extents.

In this chapter, we begin by examining the broader context of glob-alisation within which British government operates. Subsequently, wewill focus upon the impact of the EU on the broader operation ofBritish central government. Finally, we concentrate upon the interac-tion between our departments and the EU, looking at the extent towhich they have been constrained by the EU, how it has affected theiroperation and the extent to which they can resist EU pressure.

The globalisation of the state

There are many varieties of the globalisation thesis. For a few, theautonomy of the nation state has been completely undermined (see

209


1 An important criticism of the globalisation literature is that this susceptibil-ity is not new, indeed you could argue that with the decline of indebtednessand the end of sterling’s reserve role Britain is less susceptible to foreign eco-nomic pressure than it was in the sterling crisis of 1966 (see Stones 1992),the IMF crisis of 1976 (see Coates 1980) and the ERM crisis of 1992 (seeStephens 1996). For a useful summary of critical arguments see Klymlicka1999).

Ohmae 1990; Hoogvelt 1997). However, most authors agree that therehave been significant economic changes that operate as a constraintupon the autonomy of the nation state. Held et al. offer a clear state-ment of the basic position (1999: 49):

Today virtually all nation-states have gradually become enmeshedin and functionally part of a large pattern of global transformationsand global flows. Transnational networks have developed across vir-tually all areas of human activity. Goods, capital, people, knowledgecommunications and weapons, as well as crime, pollutants, fashionand beliefs, rapidly move across territorial boundaries. Far from thisbeing a world of ‘discrete civilisations’, or simply an internationalsociety of states, it has become a fundamentally interconnectedglobal order, marked by intense patterns of change as well as byclear patterns of power, hierarchy and unevenness.

For some, globalisation means there is no alternative to neo-liberalismand the introduction of NPM indicates that a new global form of governance is being imposed on the state and that such state reform isan inevitable response to economic globalisation. In this view, globaleconomic pressures have forced states to become increasingly competi-tive, to adopt neo-liberal economic policies and, thereby, to reduce theburdens which the state places upon producers and taxpayers.

Other authors suggest that Britain is more susceptible to some ofthese global trends than many other polities. Britain has long had anopen economy, a traditional commitment to free trade (see Chapter 4),and complex interconnections with financial markets through its over-seas investments, sterling’s role as a reserve currency and the centralityof the City of London. Moreover, long-term economic and politicaldecline has made Britain increasingly vulnerable to external economicpressures (see Gamble 1999; Peterson 1999).1 Baker (1997) for instance,suggests that in the area of economic policy there is significant evi-dence of the transnationalisation of the British state. He argues that

The Role of Europe 211

the increased role of international organisations, particularly the G7,WTO and EU, together with a growing commitment to liberalisationpolicies, have meant that outside influences upon British policy-making have become more important. He contends that, while Britaincannot ban the import of hormone implanted beef or Latin Americanbananas because of the WTO, it was also unable to export beef becauseof an EU ruling. The key argument is that both the process of eco-nomic globalisation and the role of international organisations con-strain the policy options of British governments.

Hirst and Thompson (1996) reflect a second strand in the globalisationliterature; they question the extent of globalisation. They argue that totalk of globalisation as if it was a simple, inexorable and uniform processis misleading. The process is more accurately understood as one of inter-nationalisation or regionalisation. So, the world is divided into three largeregional trading blocs, US/Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, with mosttrade being conducted within each bloc. In this vein, the British economyis still dominated by British domestic capital and British transnationalcorporations trade mostly in Britain and Europe and hold the majority oftheir assets in that region. At the same time, while there has been asignificant increase in the flexibility or mobility of capital, this, not sur-prisingly, is much greater in the case of financial/banking capital thanindustrial capital. Overall, the conclusion here is that globalisation is notas much a constraint on the autonomy of government as Ohmae andothers would have us believe.

Hay and Watson (1998) suggest that globalisation is a discursive orrhetorical device which has political goals; most specifically the impo-sition of neo-liberal policies. In this view, the question then is: howmuch are British governments constrained by the ‘reality’, and/or thediscursive construction of globalisation? We need to recognise thatboth the ‘reality’ and the discursive construction of globalisation orregionalisation do constrain and facilitate agents including govern-ments. As Milner and Keohane (1996: 4) put it: ‘Internationalisationaffects the opportunities and constraints facing social and economicactors, and therefore their policy preferences.’ However, it does notdetermine their actions. Governments have their own interests and areconstrained by other pressures, particularly perhaps electoral ones. Inour view, British government may appeal to the inevitability of global-isation, in the manner suggested by Hay and Watson, in order toreduce the demands upon them from within society; ‘we cannot do xor y, because we are constrained by the global pressures’. Far fromreducing their autonomy, such a strategy may allow government to


pursue its own concerns with less pressure from the various interestswithin society. As such, it is at least possible to argue that an appeal tothe discourse of globalisation may increase government autonomy,rather than reducing it. It means less will be expected of governmentin the economic sphere; this will be particularly useful to a left-of-centre government that wishes to pursue a neo-liberal strategy. At thesame time, more resources could then be devoted to trying to woo theelectorate; particularly important if we assume the main interest of agovernment is in re-election.

Milner and Keohane (1996: 4–5) are also right to argue that:‘Internationalisation affects policies and institutions differently countryto country depending on the institutional context.’ It is important not totake a deterministic or teleological approach to the issue of global pres-sure and state autonomy. State autonomy will continue to vary acrosstime and international changes may create new opportunities ratherthan constraints. Consequently, when examining the impact of externalforces on countries, let alone departments, it is crucial to understand theinstitutional context and how preferences may be shaped by externalfactors. This means that the state cannot be treated as a unified institu-tion; the impact of external pressures will vary from government to gov-ernment and from department to department. Unfortunately, we do nothave the empirical evidence to identify these differences, but it is animportant area for future research.

Whitehall and Europe

At the systemic level, the integration of Britain into the EU has clearlyhad an important impact on the domestic policy process. Gamble andPayne (1996: 250) suggest that regionalism is a state project which‘typically seeks to accelerate, to modify, or occasionally reverse thedirection of social change which emergent structures like globalisationand regionalisation represent.’ Thus, Britain’s membership of the EU isa project carried out by state actors with the aim of repositioning thestate within the context of global pressures (see Grugel and Hout1999). For Buller (2000: 2), Europeanisation can be seen not necessarilyas a constraint on the state but:

should be partly understood as a Conservative governing projectattempting to recreate some semblance of domestic autonomy andcompetence by resurrecting a rule based framework for economicmanagement. ‘Tying one’s hands’ to external (European) institu-


tions became perceived as the best way for the leadership to resistcompeting demands form societal groups.

Thus, the relationship between departments and Europe is complex.There are both general and department-specific reasons for integra-tion, but these may have intended and unintended consequences forautonomy.

The changing patterns of relations with Europe

It is important to note three things when considering Whitehall’s rela-tions with the EU. First, some departments have a much longer historyof involvement with the EU and this affects their relationships andattitudes. Second, Britain’s membership has led to the establishment ofa complex co-ordinating machinery which has been effective in social-ising departments into the EU, informing departments how to act inEurope, and ensuring that there are not too many contradictions andconflicts in British policy at the European level. Third, EU membershiphas provided significant opportunities for some departments. Indeed,on some analyses, at least two departments, the DTI and, in particular,the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), might not stillexist if it was not for EU membership.

Disaggregating involvement

In assessing the relationship between Whitehall and Europe there aretwo countervailing tendencies that reflect the nature of the British coreexecutive. On one hand, departments act as strong centripetal forces,having their own separate histories and departmental interests result-ing in different relationships with Europe. On the other hand, thereare strong centralising tendencies emanating from the Cabinet Officeand the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) which attempt tocontrol and standardise responses to Europe. However, in recent years,as departments have become more adept and better resourced indealing with Europe, they have relied much less on either CabinetOffice or FCO support. As a result, the role of the co-ordinating bodieshas become less important.

It is clear that the Single European Market and Maastricht mean thatan increasing number of departments have become involved in EUbusiness. When Britain originally joined the EEC, membership onlyhad implications for a handful of departments, of which three were themost important. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office gained a newlease of life from Community membership, after the shock of the


decline of Empire. Another department also immediately affected bymembership was MAFF because it dealt with the most comprehensiveEuropean policy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Finally, theDTI was soon dealing with the implication for British industry of the developing common market and the Community’s trade policy vis-à-vis third countries.

However, by the mid-1990s every department had been affected by aplethora of decisions taken at the Community level. The EU imposesnew burdens of work on the ministers and their civil servants. Oftendirectives passed by Brussels do not correspond precisely with existingBritish law. This leads to the formulation of new legislation, which hasto be passed at Westminster and this can have the effect of reopeningpolicy issues at a domestic level which governments have previouslytried to close (Bender 1991; Toonan 1991: 109).

Indeed, faced with this Europeanisation of public policy, a numberof academics have begun to question whether a useful distinction canstill be made between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ policy. In particular, thisprocess received a large boost after the signing of the Single EuropeanAct (SEA), which provided for the completion of the single market by1992. Suddenly, a whole raft of supply-side economic measures were tobe decided by qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers.These included the harmonisation of product standards, public pro-curement practices, professional qualifications and the liberalisation offinancial services. The impact has been to Europeanise domestic poli-tics and to speed up the decision-making process in the Commission(Bender 1991).

Co-ordinating mechanisms

The increased European activity and the ever-increasing directives fromEurope mean that all European governments need to develop a meansof integrating their national decision-making machinery with EU deci-sion-making. In Britain, this has occurred with limited formal institu-tional change at the centre. What has emerged is an informal, yetpowerful, elite comprising Number 10, the FCO, the Cabinet Officeand UKREP. Burch and Holliday (1996) point to the existence of aEuropean network with the task of managing EU policy formation cen-tring on: a Cabinet Committee, the Overseas and Defence Committee(OPD(E)), which is chaired by the Foreign Secretary; the relevantofficial committee; and the European Secretariat in the Cabinet Office.Burch and Holiday (1996: 88) argue: ‘Together these are the elementswhich form the core of the European network.’


In principle, the role of the European Secretariat is to co-ordinate theresponses of Whitehall to the EU. Therefore, it convenes meetings toensure that: the British government has a response to all new develop-ments at the European level; objectives of departments do not conflict;policy is consistent with the government’s wider objectives; and thereis proper implementation of EU decisions (see Spence 1992). Onesenior Cabinet Office official described its role as: ‘to be the neutralumpire, the dispassionate chairman of meetings and therefore toresolve conflicts between various departmental interests.’

The FCO also has a co-ordinating function. According to Spence (1992:60): ‘The FCO provides the institutional framework for the day to day co-ordination of EC policy through the Permanent Representative inBrussels.’ The FCO monitors information from Brussels, prepares briefs forthe Council of Ministers and has responsibility for political co-operation(Spence 1992). Whilst the co-ordinating role of the FCO is important forall departments, those departments are also aware that, unlike theCabinet Office, it has its own departmental interests and, as such, theyare perhaps more wary of its advice.

On the whole, departments are happy with the process of co-ordina-tion at the centre. An official in the Treasury described it as ‘excellent’and the view from the DTI was that: ‘although to the outsider the struc-ture looks very complicated and to some extent duplicatory … But actu-ally it works quite well because we all know one another … and so a lot ofit is done very informally.’ Despite the division of functions between theFCO and the European Secretariat there seems to be little overlap. Thedepartments find FCO and Cabinet Office knowledge of the EU usefuland there is a constant process of consultation between the departmentsand the co-ordinating machinery. Key policy papers have to go throughthe Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office and then on to UKREP. TheCabinet Office co-ordinates within Whitehall, but the FCO co-ordinatesinstructions to the British ambassador at UKREP. Every Friday there is ameeting involving the FCO, the head of the European division in theCabinet Office, the ambassador and the relevant departments, and anyproblems are ironed out here. Usually problems are sorted out, but if theyare not, they go up to the Cabinet Committee.

As Bulmer and Burch (1998: 606) highlight: ‘a pervasiveEuropeanisation of British central government has been consistenthitherto with the “Whitehall model” of government … Rather,European integration has been absorbed into the “logic” of theWhitehall machinery.’ This adjustment again emphasises the way inwhich regional and international pressures are mediated by existing


state institutions. The impact of the EU on the formal structure, organ-isation and rules of Whitehall has been surprisingly limited. There hasbeen little reassessment of notions of ministerial responsibility, collec-tive responsibility or even parliamentary sovereignty in the light of EUmembership. How, for instance, can collective responsibility be sus-tained when decisions are taken in arenas that have little or no rela-tionship with the Cabinet?

Nevertheless, it is clear that the role of the co-ordinators has changedand, in one sense, this change has been about ensuring the continua-tion of collective mechanisms. To some extent, the FCO believes that itstill controls contact with Brussels:

Any input that a UK government department wants to make into thesystem in Brussels goes through the UK Permanent Representative inBrussels. They are the people who talk to the Commission, talk toother member states and so on.

The formal position is that all EU issues are discussed and clearedthrough the FCO and Cabinet Office machinery. The reality, however, isthat, as EU business increases and the process of co-ordinating all depart-ments is more complex (Bulmer and Burch 1998: 14), the FCO and theCabinet Office are losing control and departments are increasingly con-ducting business directly with the Commission and other member states.Clearly, departments with regular EU contact, like the DTI and MAFF, arecompetent at conducting their own negotiations. Similarly, the DoE saidthat, except for major issues of legislation:

The majority of our links are bilateral … There is a continuousprocess of consultation and communication on a bilateral basis …We also have a lot of direct bilateral contact with officials in DG 11in the Commission who are dealing with the areas that we are con-cerned with. We also have a lot of bilateral contact with our oppo-site numbers in the Environment Ministries in other member states.

The preferences of officials in relation to Europe have been influenced bythe process of integration. The FCO and the Cabinet Office have adaptedwell to the need to co-ordinate European policy. According to Bulmer andBurch (1998: 10): ‘The key departments – notably the Cabinet Office,FCO and the Treasury – seem to have reached an understanding quiteeasily and there were no significant department turf wars.’ Individualdepartments are increasingly developing close relationships with both theCommission and their opposite numbers in other member states. They


are aware of the need to build coalitions. History does affect preferencesbut institutional interests are of greater importance.

The institutional interests

As Milner and Keohane (1996) and other neo-institutionalists imply,history has a profound effect on the attitudes of departments to Europebut the institutional interests of departments appear even more impor-tant. For some departments, Europe provides an opportunity for increas-ing their role and autonomy whilst for others it is a constraint on theiractivities. According to a senior official in the Cabinet Office:

Departments tend to have a view of Europe which at least in partreflects the nature of the impact of Europe on their work. MAFF,because the impact of Europe has made the department moreimportant and determines its policy, finds itself very closelyinvolved. Whereas the Treasury, because it is such a bloody nuisance for them, tends to find itself rather irritated.

Europe has been integrated into the work of some departments for along period now; it provides new opportunities and enhances theirfunctions. Consequently, they tend to be positive in their approach. Aswe said earlier, Europe has given two departments, MAFF and, to alesser extent, the DTI an important raison d’être without which theymight have disappeared.

MAFF certainly has the closest relationships with Europe; with thegreatest institutional interest in the growing role of the EU in British poli-tics. MAFF has little autonomy in terms of agricultural policy. It is a smalldepartment in terms of budget, economic importance, political weightand size. Despite the logic of Thatcherism that would have pointed to theend of large subsidies to agriculture and the abolition of the department,it has outlived departments such as Employment and Energy with largerbudgets. EU membership has not only saved the Ministry of Agriculturebut probably also increased its autonomy (Smith 1993). There is nonational agricultural policy and much of the time of many MAFF officialsis spent in Brussels. Officials within MAFF, despite their acknowledge-ment of CAP’s problems, are generally pro-European. The impact of theEuropean agricultural policy has been to save their department and, at atime of economic retrenchment, to ensure that farmers’ subsidies are pro-tected. Effectively, membership of the EU has meant that agriculturalexpenditure is not subjected to Treasury control and, as long as theCouncil of Agricultural Ministers remains pro-farmer, it is unlikely thatMAFF expenditures will be radically reduced. As such, the department has


been able, to some extent, to resist Treasury calls for the reform of CAP.Despite several rounds of reform, farmers still receive large subsidies andCAP continues to take 50 per cent of the EU budget (Grant 1995), main-taining a crucial role for MAFF.

The EU has increased both the institutional and individual utilitiesof MAFF officials (see Dunleavy 1991). As a Cabinet Office officialpointed out, with EC membership:

MAFF suddenly found itself conducting its own foreign policy.MAFF officials at a rather junior level suddenly found they weregoing off to Brussels to negotiate. Not only that, they were flying allover the world to negotiate in a way that the Foreign Office couldn’tcontrol. So, suddenly there was a small element of foreign policythat was run by MAFF instead of the Foreign Office. Unsurprisingly,MAFF officials really rather liked that. I think that, naturallyenough, they really rather enjoy negotiation. They find it fun andthe Brussels game is a big game, it’s a fun game. Officials at a farmore junior level than before found themselves speaking on behalfof Britain, playing this game for all they were worth. And that partlygoes to explain why MAFF has always been more pro-European.

Departments’ relations with Europe

How do our departments relate to Europe? Why are there differenttypes of relationships? Here, we shall examine each of our extantdepartments in turn, before considering some other departments forcomparative purposes.


For the DTI, the relationship with the EU is intense but more complexthan is the case for MAFF. One senior official confirmed: ‘Quite a lot ofthe policy we operate flows from a directive which we have agreed inthe past and we have produced legislation here to implement the direc-tive.’ As one former Permanent Secretary argued, if we assess the differ-ent relations departments have with Europe in terms of a continuum,then MAFF is at the end of the continuum which represents the closestcontact while the DTI would be located somewhere between MAFF andthe middle of the continuum:

They were nowhere near as close to Europe as MAFF … Althoughour minister would go, it was nothing like as significant in terms of


industry policy as going to Brussels on agriculture policy. But therewere areas where it was significant and the most important of thoseI suspect was competition policy and state aid because we got intotrouble over the so-called sweeteners given in the privatisation ofthe Rover Group. One had to be very conscious of the possibility oftrouble of that kind. In a sense you couldn’t avoid it in MAFFbecause of course every decision of any significance was taken inBrussels. In the DTI that was not so, the decisions of significancewere taken in London but some of them impinge on areas where theCommission had got competence … We had enormous negotiationswith them for instance over the privatisation of Leyland trucks.

Another official who worked in Energy emphasised the increasingimpact of the EU:

[It was] very strong and increasing throughout my period … Thepressure was constant, the flow of draft directives was absurd. Youcan’t cope with that type of thing. There is too much work involvedin trying to make sense of it. So I spent a lot of time in Brussels justbeing I suppose bloody minded and obstructive.

Similarly, on the trade side, one official emphasised: ‘No position couldbe taken except by agreement with Brussels.’ As is the case with agri-cultural policy, the key decisions in relation to trade policy are nowtaken in the EU.

However, even within the DTI it is difficult to generalise over theimpact of the EU. As one official pointed out: ‘in areas like food policythe EU is important but its impact is not particularly constraining (but)come to Competition and we are in a different world because theCommission qua Commission has enormous powers’. Obviously, the impact of the EU is limited by its competence as well as by theresistance and implementation resources of the nation states.

Nevertheless, the DTI, like MAFF, faced questions over its existenceand, therefore, the EU was important institutionally to it. The logic ofThatcherism was not to have a DTI and, with privatisation and the end ofmany industrial subsidies, questions were often raised about its existence,or more specifically of the industry side of it (Purnell 1995). Notsurprisingly then, the DTI sees significant benefits in EU membership:

The DTI has always had positive objectives in Europe. We have hadsome defensive ones too but there have always been things that we


have wanted to achieve, and those things on the whole have beenless controversial in party political terms.

The DTI has had three important reasons for seeing the EU as beneficial.First, it provides the DTI with a significant amount of work. Issues relat-ing to the single European market, regulation, monopolies and mergers,technology, trade and industrial subsidies are key aspects of EU policywhich are dealt with by the DTI. Luckily for the DTI, whilst the statehas been rolled back at the national level, it has been extended at theEU level and this has led to a new role for the department.

Second, throughout its history, the DTI, or more specifically its tradeside, has been a strong supporter of free trade. Trade issues are bestresolved at the multinational level and therefore the DTI is one of thefew departments which actually believes in the need for a strongCommission. As a DTI official commented:

I think that the Department has consistently been in favour of aEurope which: is open to the outside world; creates an effectiveinternal market; is tough on state aid and on monopoly practices;has an effective competition policy; and spends money wisely …We have also become one of the departments that has been arguingfor deregulation in Europe, or at least better regulation … All ofwhich leads us in institutional terms to favour, on the whole, astrong Commission which is capable of policing single market,policing state aids and which is capable of devising and seeingthrough an effective liberal trade policy …

Third, as that point demonstrates, unlike other departments, EU poli-cies have complemented DTI domestic policy and it has been a way ofachieving domestic policy goals (Buller 2000). The view in the DTI isthat: ‘in the areas that are core to the DTI, trade policy and singlemarket policy, we are closer to the Commission probably than anyother member state’. One official pointed out that in the area ofresearch and technology, the EU was beneficial: ‘It’s actually facilitat-ing.’ Another civil servant in the Trade Division agreed: ‘Oh it’s a facil-itator. It’s a constraint in some senses but by and large the EU is a largetrading bloc and it should be a means of promulgating a messagewhich you think is beneficial to European Union and to the UK.’Crucially, the EU has enhanced the autonomy of the DTI. It hascreated new areas of responsibility and allowed the DTI to make policyat the EU level rather than in Whitehall.


Of course, one personally important feature of the EU for officials isthe freedom of manoeuvre it gives them when they are negotiatingaway from the direct control of their political masters. One DTI officialadmitted that they had a degree of freedom in negotiations. Whilstbriefs were drawn pretty tightly:

… in any international negotiations there comes a point where thepace suddenly changes. Everybody feels that if you keep at it there isa solution, if you go away to seek further instruction it will breakdown and you have to start all over again. In those circumstances,you have got no choice but to go for the best you can get even it isnot actually prescribed in your brief … You must have somefreedom of judgement if you are going to reach any agreement atall. It is not the slightest good ministers or Cabinets or whoeverthinking that they can keep total control.

Another former official indicated that:

The officials were pursuing the ministerial brief set for them inLondon and they found they could not deliver that because of theefforts of different officials with different briefs from Brussels, Paris,and Bonn and so on. They could come back and say well the bestwe can get is this, will that do. The minister at the end of the dayhas to defend it in the British Parliament. That is how it works. Youare having to operate at several removes from those who actuallymake the decisions.

Officials get to take more decisions and to make more choices becauseof the extent and intricacies of EU negotiations. From a rational choiceperspective, this clearly suits the interests of officials.

Although the DTI recognises the advantages to it of the EU this doesnot mean that it is a Europe-federalist department, although oneofficial said: ‘insofar as it was decent to be so, the Department was acommitted European’. However, whilst there were strong institu-tional reasons for the DTI being committed in this way, the natureof that commitment varied with ministers. In the 1970s when PeterShore was Secretary of State, the department had to inform him ofall contacts with Europe. Likewise, Lord Young insisted that the atti-tude of the Department towards the EU was neutral and he ensured


that officials did not foist unwanted policies on ministers behindthe shield of Europe.


Whilst departments like the DTI and MAFF have found crucial aspectsof their responsibilities integrated into the EU policy, the impact ofEurope has been much less in the area of social policy. As Cramemphasises, the extent of binding legislation in the areas of EU socialpolicy is limited (Cram 1997: 29). As such, the DSS operates withoutmuch regard to the impact of the EU. This was particularly so in theearly 1980s, as Patrick Jenkin recalled: ‘At the DHSS there was noEuropean Committee at all which I was involved in and I don’t evenremember going to Brussels.’ Nevertheless, the DSS finds the EU isadding both legislative and expenditure burdens by increasinglyattempting to harmonise social policy despite Britain’s opt-out fromthe Social Chapter throughout the Conservative years. The DSS has ateam of lawyers continually examining and contesting EU regulations.As one serving official stated: ‘We do have regard to implications underEuropean Law but that should be part of the policy-making processand we would particularly rely on lawyers in pointing out the pitfalls.’

A former Permanent Secretary confirmed:

We certainly aren’t as heavily involved as a department like MAFFbecause the EU doesn’t actually have competence in social securityas such. So we are not in a position in which every minute of ourday-to-day business is affected by European policy. The area where ithas had a large impact is with equal treatment directives. I think ittook us a little time to realise how significant this was going to be.… Therefore, we had to restructure the system around it. So, we arevery alert to the need to make sure we are okay in European termsand quite a lot of our cases would get to the European Court in oneway or another. But it is not central, it doesn’t govern our living,breathing lives.

Thus, for the DSS, in contrast to the DTI, policy-making is not deeplyintegrated with the EU but they have to be aware of the ways in whichthe EU can constrain British policy-making. To the extent that the EUdoes affect the DSS, it is perceived as a burden rather than an opportu-nity. As such, the perspective of the department on Europe is oftennegative. When the DSS develops policy, it considers the possible waysin which policy initiatives might conflict with EU directives. In con-trast, it is not really involved in developing integrated EU policies.


The Home Office

For the Home Office, the relationship with Europe is more ambivalent.In certain policy areas, such as drugs, the EU level is seen as a usefullevel for organising and co-operating on policy. On others, such asimmigration, the relationship has been more problematic. In somesenses, the Home Office is the least integrated of the departments,coming very late to acknowledging the importance of Europe. It is onlyin the late 1980s that the EU had any real impact on the department atall. In the words of a former Grade 2: ‘Europe was only seen asencroaching on the corner of several people’s gardens.’

In talking to officials, it is also apparent that, to a large extent, theHome Office is still concerned with limiting EU competence, maintain-ing sovereignty and protecting national interests. The Home Officedoes not see it as in its interest to lose control of policy on immigra-tion, law and order or criminal justice issues that have such domesticpolitical importance.

The aim of Conservative Home Secretaries in the 1980s and early1990s was to prevent the EU encroaching on their policy competence.Kenneth Baker admitted that he was impatient with the direction ofEU policy. Similarly, David Waddington revealed that: ‘We managedto sideline most of the issues … and of course the Home Office waspretty successful and some might say has remained successfullykeeping many of the major issues out of the clutches of Brussels.’ EvenDouglas Hurd, who was more emollient in his attitude to Europe,claimed: ‘[it] was not a real problem. I just regard it as common-sensethat co-operation is needed in intelligence and police matters, drugsand so on. This was something that interested me and we carried it astage further. I would not claim it was a huge leap.’ It is important tonote that this Home Office ambivalence to the EU is not purelydepartmental. As one official said in 1998 in the case of direction fromthe centre: ‘In the Home Office they are being told very much not toplay the European game in terms of not having joint immigration lawand all that sort of stuff.’

From the point of view of the Home Office, the EU is a problem and,therefore, a constant aim of the department has been to prevent itencroaching on its territory unless there are specific advantages. So,whilst the Home Office would not countenance European-wide ruleson immigration, it is happy to involve itself in Trevi if that improvesanti-drug capabilities. The Home Office’s aim is to keep decision-making at an intergovernmental level in order to opposeimposition from the EU.


A comparison with other departments

The differential impact of the EU is highlighted by some brief compar-isons with other departments. One important point is that a degree ofscepticism about the EU does not only exist in newly integrated depart-ments. The Treasury has always been involved in European policy. As aTreasury official admitted: ‘There are no bits of Treasury work now thatdon’t have some kind of European dimension.’ Nevertheless, the rela-tionship with the EU is somewhat ambivalent. The EU is frustrating forthe Treasury because it reduces their autonomy; economic policy is nolonger purely a domestic concern. A senior Treasury official empha-sised: ‘There are more attempts by Europe to try to dictate the way that financial and monetary policy is run’ and, whilst the Treasurykeeps monetary union as a medium-term policy option, it is open toEU economic pressures. As Thain and Wright (1996: 550) point out,the implications of free movement of capital and labour are ‘a conver-gence of regulations and payments in social security and income main-tenance’ which will further constrain Treasury control. Nevertheless,the constraint of the EU is vicarious rather than direct. The extent towhich sterling is linked to the Euro impacts on monetary policy. Yet,as Artis (1998: 137) illustrates, there is little in direct EU regulation onmonetary and financial policy. Consequently, in the area of economicpolicy, Treasury superiority remains:

I don’t think that membership of the European Union has changedthe Treasury much. I think it’s more the other way around, in thesense that the UK thinks that it can try and persuade the Europeansthat its approach to economic policy is the sensible one.

In the area of public expenditure, the EU is even more of a problem forTreasury officials. From the initial period of membership until the mid-1980s, the Treasury had a problem because of the size of the Britishfinancial contribution. This was an area of public expenditure that wasoutside EU control. In addition, in a range of policy areas the EU canforce expenditure that the Treasury cannot control and would preferdid not exist. This has become increasingly apparent in the area ofregional spending where the EU has provided funds to Britain on thegrounds that there would be additionality (i.e. the subsidies would beadditional to, not a replacement of, existing expenditure). However,the Treasury has continually sought ways of circumventing the addi-tionality requirement (Bache 1996).


Therefore, the EU creates problems for the Treasury. As a CabinetOfficial explains:

Their more sceptical approach derives from their lack of controlover allocation of resources, which they find difficult to accept.Together with the fact that there is a budgetary procedure, and an auditing procedure that the Treasury will feel is less effectivethat domestic equivalents and it must be rather frustrating forthem.

The Treasury’s domestic instinct is to say no to new legislation on thebasis that it will increase public expenditure and this scepticism con-tinues at the EU level. This is confirmed within the Treasury where anofficial suggested that the Treasury goes to a whole range of meetingscovering even issues like home affairs because of potential expenditureincreases: ‘I suppose the Treasury is very suspicious and doesn’t thinkthat it can trust anybody.’ Even with a pro-European Chancellor, theTreasury will try to slow up integration measures if they think it willresult in increased costs.

The attitude of departments and the way they relate to Europe variesgreatly. Civil servants do not have a set of endogenously determinedpreferences. Instead, their preferences are institutionally determined.For some departments, Europe creates new opportunities and mayincrease autonomy in relation to the Cabinet or the Treasury. Forothers it clearly indicates a loss of control. In such cases, the tendencyis to attempt further to slow integration.

The Department of Environment (DoE) increasingly finds much ofits work deeply enmeshed in the EU level. The EC Council of Ministershas agreed over 300 items of legislation affecting the environment inthe past twenty years. For example, as one senior civil servant argued:‘the extent to which one can consider what is done in the UK in termsof controlling pollution as being separate from European legislation isvery limited’. This development provides opportunities and constraintsfor the DoE. On the one hand, the EU enables DoE to press environ-mental legislation on other departments, in particular MAFF and theDTI, which if decided at the domestic level might be opposed. On theother hand, nearly all environmental legislation is decided at the EUlevel, greatly restricting what DoE can do on its own in this area. Thereis an explicit awareness in the DoE, expressed in an internal report,that Europe limits what the Department can do:


Building alliances will make it more likely that decisions taken inBrussels are nearer to our policy objectives. But we must not deludeourselves about what is deliverable even by a truly professionalapproach to Europe. No one member can determine theCommunity’s agenda, the pace of discussion or the final outcome.What it can do, however, is make sure that its own views are under-stood by other EU actors.

The general feeling in DoE seems to be one that favours EU integrationas a means of strengthening environmental legislation. Nevertheless,and this again provides an indication of how the institutional contextinfluences preferences, officials are well aware of the political context:

In many ways we are more sceptical than we might wish to be if wewere masters of our own house. The stance that we take up gener-ally on European policy, but also on individual issues, is not some-thing that we dream up in isolation in our ivory towers. In fact, thetheory of collective cabinet responsibility turns out to work, andthis is something we are very conscious of. We do have in Whitehalla very strong commitment to obtaining cross-government clearancefor stances we take up in individual policy areas.

For the Foreign Office, the EU is important because it is effectively thelead Department on European policy and, as Britain’s world role hasdeclined, the Foreign Office has managed to maintain its status as acentral negotiator in key European issues. A Foreign Office officialpointed out that the FCO is conscious that: ‘Britain’s involvement inEurope is central to its future as an international power … and I thinkwe may be particularly conscious in the Foreign Office that the UK’sfuture on the international stage is very much bound up with its beinga major player in Europe.’

Departments which have only recently become engaged in Europetend to be more sceptical about its involvement in domestic policy. ACabinet Office official suggested:

I think it is certainly true that departments like the DSS or theDepartment of Health or the Department of National Heritage, all ofwhich over the last few years have found European policies intrud-ing on their areas, are still largely operating on the basis of a discreetand hermetically sealed group of people who deal with Europe. Assuch, they see it as an imposition and a difficulty. At the same time,


the rest of the Department, which goes on creating domestic policy,thinks that the European aspect is a distraction.

Co-ordination within departments

The departments’ relations with Europe have affected co-ordinationwithin departments. In August 1993, John Gummer wrote to John Major saying that the only way the political objective of placingthe United Kingdom at the heart of Europe is delivered in practice‘(is) by seeing to it that Whitehall Departments become, and remain,truly European, professionals in the ways of Brussels.’ However,different departments organise in very different ways. Neverthe-less, in the post-Maastricht era, there seems a concerted effort tointegrate Europe much more into the everyday operations ofdepartments.

The Treasury provides a good example of how intradepartmental co-ordination has changed. As one Treasury official pointed out:

Five years ago all the relations with Europe were handled by theEurope Division in the International Section. Now what happens isthat every team that deals with a particular policy domestically alsodeals with it at an international and European level. So, forexample, the team that dealt with MAFF expenditure also deals withCAP.

So, rather than there being EU specialists, all officials within theTreasury have some EU competence. In addition, there is a small co-ordination team – EU Co-ordination and Strategy – that ensures thata unified departmental line is maintained and deals with issues wherea domestic section does not have departmental expertise. The divi-sion also plays the co-ordinating role at the external level and repre-sents the department in Cabinet Office meetings. Nevertheless, thereis still an impression in the Treasury that Europe is not, as yet, thatimportant or central to its work. A Cabinet Office official suggestedthat there are a number of Treasury officials closely involved in EUwork but:

There is a culture within the Treasury, there is a smallish cadre ofpeople who have made their careers dealing with EU matters … Andperhaps the vast majority of Treasury officials do see Europeanissues as something not to be touched with a barge pole.


Even in the Foreign Office, which has been centrally involved in theEU since 1973, there has been a change in the way that EU business isintegrated into the department. As one official emphasised, recentdevelopments, such as the collapse of Eastern Europe, greater Europeanpolitical co-operation and a common security policy:

mean that there is virtually nobody in any corner of the ForeignOffice not used sometime having to go off to attend a workinggroup in Brussels … There is generally a far greater consciousness ofthe European dimension of business all through the office.

In formal organisational terms the FCO has a European Unioncommand with three departments: a European Union DepartmentExternal which deals with external economic policy of the EuropeanUnion; a EU Department Internal which is concerned with EMU, theIGC and all the institutional questions and it deals with shadowing thework of domestic departments; and the Common Foreign and SecurityPolicy Department which deals with briefing the political director andwith all the second pillar work.

Similarly, the DTI which again has been closely involved inEuropean policy has always had a European division. Now, as oneofficial argued: ‘we have concluded that the only way you can now runEU policy in reality is by letting the individual experts get on with it’.So, whilst there is some central co-ordination on a range of policyareas, such as telecoms or consumer protection, the department doesnot co-ordinate. At present, the role of the European Division is to:provide a overview of what is going on in the department in relation toEurope; provide advice on the working procedures of the EU; and, insome senses, act as a European secretariat for the department. Much ofthe department’s contact with the EU is now bilateral, with officialswithin the department consulting with people in the EU and the gov-ernments of other member states.

In this field, it is the Department of the Environment that has beenthe most proactive. The department has undertaken a review of how ithandled European business. One of the problems for the DoE is thatwhilst some of its responsibilities, such as water, have a clearEuropean dimension, others, like housing and local government, arelargely domestic. Therefore, there has not been an attempt to forceall divisions into adopting similar approaches to the EU. Rather,there is a high-level European Strategy Group that brings togetherGrade 2 officials from different policy areas every three to six months


to review the department’s European strategy. In addition, there is aEuropean Division within the Environmental Protection Group fordealing with day-to-day European issues and providing expertise forthe whole of the department on Europe. In areas where there is ahigh European content to policy, contact is bilateral rather thanthrough a co-ordinating body.

It is clear that in recent years most departments have madesignificant organisational changes in order to adapt to the require-ments of the EU. It is interesting that, in most cases, departments haveattempted to integrate the EU throughout the department rather thanconcentrating it within a European co-ordination body as used to bethe case. However, there are still some departments, notably the HomeOffice and the DoE, in which large parts of the department have littleEU relevance and, in these cases, the European Division takes on amuch more central role. There are significant differences in the waythat departments deal with the EU, in the sense that some, such as theDTI and DoE, seem to have come to terms with the importance of theEU and see the relevance of intimate and regular contacts. Others, likethe FCO and Treasury, still tend to see the EU as external and more ofan aspect of foreign, rather than domestic, policy and see their role asprotecting national interests. These differences are again stronglyrelated to institutional interests. For the DoE, there is some evidencethat EU engagement is a way of obtaining more rigorous environmen-tal regulation than it could achieve in a purely domestic context. Fordepartments like MAFF, the DTI and DoE, Europe increases their rolesand they consequently developed trans-governmental links.

The impact of ministers

Despite the critiques from both the left and the right of the politicalspectrum that civil servants are a power unto themselves and oftenpursue policies regardless of the desires of ministers, there is strong evi-dence that civil servants are very much constrained by ministers’wishes and their perceived or stated policy preferences. Civil servantsare very conscious of constitutional conventions and ministerial pref-erences clearly limit their actions when they negotiate in Europe. As aresult, the attitude of a department to Europe does vary according towho is minister. One civil servant was particularly explicit about theimpact of ministers during the Conservative administration:

When Mr Portillo was Secretary of State in the Department ofEmployment, his officials adopted a stunningly Euro-sceptical line


because that’s what he wanted them to do. Similarly, Home Officeofficials take a very Euro-sceptical line now because that is what MrHoward wants them to do and Treasury officials take a much moreEuro-phile line because that is what Mr Clarke wants them to do.

To some extent the support of Kenneth Clarke for the EU placedTreasury officials, who had long been cautious about Europe, in adifficult position: ‘You have to judge fairly carefully what theChancellor is likely to think and how he is going to play it.’Nevertheless, it is also the case that departmental interests can makeministers look at Europe in a different light and in that sense they tooare affected by institutional interests:

If you look at an issue like qualified majority voting, for example,the experience of the Minister of Agriculture shows on most agricul-tural issues qmv works in favour of the UK’s position because wehave been able to get through decisions against the resistance of oneor two projectionist member states. The situation is similar in theDTI.

In the DTI, they have had ministers with sharply contrasting views onEurope ranging from Ridley to Heseltine who have changed theemphasis of policy towards Europe, but on the whole there has beensome degree of consistency. So, ministers do influence how officialsdeal with Europe, but ministers’ positions also reflect the department’sinstitutional interests towards Europe. Despite strong ideological pref-erences, their positions in office are not just endogenously determined.

Conclusion

In terms of the debates on globalisation and regionalisation, thischapter has presented some important findings. New global andregional pressures impact, not only on states but also within states. Incertain departments, such as the DTI, external pressures have affectedpreferences, resources, options, departmental organisation and roles,whilst in the DSS and the Home Office, the impact has been minimal.The EU has provided a further constraint on the operation of thesedepartments, but has not determined how they operate, nor the natureof their policy decisions.

In effect, agents within departments, whether ministers or officials,have attempted to draw on the resources of the EU when it can


further departmental interests. For the DTI in particular, the EU wasextremely useful in justifying the department’s existence at a timewhen laissez-faire economic doctrine was undermining its role. In thecase of the Home Office, further EU integration would only removepolicy responsibility from the department and, therefore, it has foughtagainst attempts to increase EU control.

As such, the impact of the EU is strongly affected, and mediated, bythe institutional interests of departments. Nevertheless, the ideologiesand views of ministers have not been unimportant in shaping the waythat departments have reacted to external demands. The importance ofministers in determining the position of departments in relation to theEU again emphasises the limits of deterministic accounts of the impactof globalisation. It is striking that, despite nearly 30 years of Europeanintegration and major developments through the Single European Actand Maastricht, there are still substantial areas of government onwhich the EU does not impinge. Moreover, for a number of depart-ments, the concern is not how they can develop policy within thecontext of the EU, but how they can make domestic policy withoutinfringing EU regulations. So, whilst the EU has shaped some of thepreferences of actors and the structures of departments, it has had littleimpact on the culture of Whitehall and, despite increasing exchangesand the development of a European fast-track for British civil servants,few of the norms of continental European bureaucratic culture havebeen adopted in Britain.

Despite growing international pressure, as Baker acknowledges:‘policy makers still tend to think in terms of national interests’. Indeed,Menon and Hayward (1996: 284) conclude that, even in the area ofindustrial policy where the degree of EU integration is relatively high:‘Community influence has been relatively minor. Certainly, the abilityof the Community to impose policy solutions on member states hasbeen limited.’ Similarly, as regards British macro-economic policy, theEU has ‘had little impact on national policy’ (Menon and Forder 1998:182). Moreover, in areas like education, social policy and transportpolicy the impact of the EU has been even less.

10Assessing the Differentiated PolityModel: towards an AsymmetricPower Model

Our aim in this book has been to examine the changes that occurredwithin British central government departments between 1974 and1997. In this conclusion we will begin by outlining the main changesthat have occurred within departments and then we will return to thegeneral issues raised in the introduction which we have used to organ-ise our analysis. The second section will assess the utility of Rhodes’differentiated polity as a conceptualisation of the operation of theBritish polity in the light of our study which focuses upon most of theissues discussed by Rhodes. In the third section we revisit the meta-theoretical issues addressed in the introduction; the relationshipsbetween structure and agency and ideas and institutions. The penulti-mate section then considers the broadest question of all, although it isone which clearly relates to the differentiated polity model: does ouranalysis confirm the utility of the pluralist conceptualisation of theBritish power structure? Finally, on the basis of our analysis, we shalldevelop our conceptualisation of the operation of the British polity,which we shall call the asymmetric power model.

Assessing the extent of change

As we have seen, much of the existing literature suggests that therehave been major changes in central government, the role of the CivilService and relationships within the core executive. We have a numberof findings:

• There have been changes in the general Whitehall culture and thestructures of central government and this has had an impact on the

232

policy and organisational cultures of departments. However, thedegree of impact varies from department to department.

• The Civil Service maintains many of its traditional elements.Officials are still the dominant policy advisers within the core exec-utive and their advice on political operations within Whitehallremains essential to ministers. However, their role has changed.There are alternative sources of advice, senior officials – Grades 1and 2 – have become more involved in management – and the keypolicy-making function has drifted downwards to lower grades ofsenior civil servants.

• Despite moves to joined-up government and presumptions aboutfluidity in the Civil Service, most officials continue to operatewithin the confines of their departments without much interdepart-mental contact. It is not easy to apply the notion of policy networksto intra-Whitehall relationships because networks tend to be ad hoc,temporary, fluid and personal.

• The role of interest groups in policy-making declined under theConservative governments except where there were relationships ofhigh dependence.

• Although the EU has had a big impact on the work of some depart-ments, it impinges little on the day-to-day work of many officials.

• The resources of ministers have increased yet the relationshipbetween ministers and officials is still one of dependence. Themajority of officials and ministers believe that the relationship isstill a good one and it tends to be individual ministers who havequestioned the traditional role of the Civil Service.

• The Westminster model still informs the value systems of officials andministers. Whilst there have been changes in intra- and inter-Whitehall relationships, they have not undermined many of the tradi-tional assumptions that the practitioners have about the workings ofthe system. In this sense, there is some dissonance between thelanguage of management and the language of the constitution.

In essence, whilst much has changed, much remains the same and thishas important implications for some of the more general questions wehave raised.

The differentiated polity model

As we saw in the introductory chapter, Rhodes argues that theWestminster model presents a misleading conceptualisation of how

Assessing the Differentiated Polity Model: towards an Asymmetric Power Model 233


the British political system works and advocates an alternative model,which he calls the differentiated polity model. This is an importantissue because we cannot analyse British politics without using somemodel as an organising principle for that analysis. How useful is theRhodes model? Of course, no single study can adjudicate on the utilityof such a broad model, but our analysis does focus upon most of its ele-ments. In particular, we have addressed the following issues which arethe core of this model:

• Has governance replaced government?• How important are policy networks in policy-making and who dom-

inates these networks?• Is the executive segmented?• To what extent are the relations within the core executive and

between the core executive and interest groups based upon theexchange of resources and power dependency?

• To what extent has the British state been hollowed out?

These questions are obviously related, but here we shall deal with themseparately while emphasising the interconnections.

Governance or government?

To an extent this issue is semantic. In talking of governance, Rhodes isconcerned to point out that actors from outside the core executive areinvolved in the policy and administration processes. This is clearlyimportant. Interest groups do play a key role in these processes,although some groups have a larger role than others, as we argued inChapter 8. In addition, local government and now devolved govern-ments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in Rhodes’ term sub-national governments, are important political actors, although theyhave not been a focus of our study. At the same time, quangos played agrowing role in politics in the period we have studied, although againwe have only touched upon that role (see Flinders and Smith 1998).However, in our view, while we need to acknowledge the role of theseactors from outside the core executive, and for that reason it may bebetter to talk of governance rather than government, we should notoveremphasise that development.

Our analysis suggests that the key actors in policy-making in Britainare still within, rather than outside, the core executive. As we shallargue below, while interest groups do play a role in policy-making andare involved in exchange relationships with government, often within


policy networks, in the vast majority of instances it is governmentwhich is the dominant partner, largely because they have greaterresources. As such, we are happy to talk of governance rather than gov-ernment as long as that is not taken to mean that the balance betweenthe core executive and other key political actors has changed, in-exorably, consistently and finally, in favour of the latter.

One other point is important here. We are not saying that the coreexecutive has overwhelming, let alone complete, autonomy. We acceptthat other actors play an important role. We also acknowledge that thereare broader constraints, which Rhodes views as key elements of thehollowing-out process. We shall return to both of these issues below.

Policy networks

In our view policy networks do play an important role in the Britishpolitical system and, as such, Rhodes is right to highlight that role.However, our analysis suggests five important points. First, it is crucialto disaggregate. Relationships between departments and interestgroups vary according to the department, the policy area and the time.Second, it appears that there are relatively few very tight policy net-works, policy communities in the terminology of Marsh and Rhodes(1999). In our four departments, only the relationship between theHome Office and ACPO appeared to be a policy community which per-sisted over the 25 years of our study, although, of course, that does notmean there were no tight networks in other departments or that in ourdepartments there were no very close relationships for extendedperiods. Third, policy networks are based upon exchange relationships.So, the closest relationships are the ones in which the interest groupshave significant resources to exchange with departments. These arealso the groups which find it easiest to retain their position, even ifthere is a change of government, a change of ideology or a change ofpolicy. As such, as we saw in Chapter 8, ACPO’s close relationship withthe Home Office persisted because it had crucial resources to exchange.Overall, as Marsh and Rhodes (1992a) argued, it is the powerful economic and professional groups which have the greatest resources toexchange with government and, as such, it is those groups which areevident in policy communities.

Fourth, and relatedly, the nature of policy networks does change overtime. They are particularly subject to a change in the broader, exogenous,context in which they operate. More specifically, in the period we haveexamined, a number of relationships between interest groups and depart-


ments changed because the attitude of government to consultationchanged. So, while the relationships between all interests groups and theConservative government did not change immediately it came to powerin 1979, in the social policy field in particular they did deteriorate overtime. This was partly because the government was ideologically opposedto the concerns of most of the groups and partly because of its broadantipathy towards consultation which it associated with weak govern-ment and the postwar consensus. When the Labour government waselected in 1997 the situation quickly changed. They were committed toconsultation and had relied on many of these interest groups for policysupport when in opposition. As such, consultation between the DSS andsocial policy interest groups became much more frequent and policy net-works were re-established. However, it is worth noting that these are notpolicy communities because the resources such groups have to exchangeare limited.

Fifth, our analysis suggests that in most networks, it is the govern-ments, or more specifically the departments, who are the more impor-tant actors. We have emphasised that policy networks are based uponexchange relationships, so we are not arguing here that departmentstotally dominate networks. Rather, we are suggesting that they havegreater resources and, as such, tend to have more influence in the net-works. Departments possess the key resources because only they, actingon behalf of the government, have the authority to pass legislation. Inaddition, they decide who is consulted and who is excluded. Of course,some interest groups have key resources; they might provide essentialadvice during the policy-making process or are crucial to ensure effec-tive and economic implementation of a policy once it is passed. So,government needs them and therefore they are consulted. However, aswe saw in Chapter 8, even with a group in a position like ACPO, theextent to which it is consulted and has influence varies, depending to alarge extent on the attitude of the Home Office. Other groups withfewer resources are much more susceptible to the changing views ofgovernment departments.

Overall, while we agree with Rhodes’ view that policy networks areimportant, we are wary of overemphasising that importance. In partic-ular, our analysis indicates that we need to take the role of govern-ment, or rather departments, in policy networks more seriously thanthe network literature generally, or the differentiated polity modelspecifically, suggests. However, their use for understanding relation-ships within or between departments is much less, partly because net-works within the core executive are too fluid to analyse and partly


because it is the wider Whitehall culture which provides the rules ofinteraction rather than specific networks.

A segmented executive?

Our analysis is based upon the idea that the core executive is seg-mented, so clearly here we agree with Rhodes. Some studies downplaythe importance of departments focusing upon the role of the PrimeMinister; a focus which in the 1980s was exacerbated by an obsessionwith the putative dominance of Thatcher. In contrast, we have empha-sised that departments are important actors in the core executive. AsRhodes argues, relationships within the core executive are also exchangerelationships. We have emphasised that the relationships between thePrime Minister and departments, between the Treasury and the depart-ments, among departments and between ministers and civil servants arenot zero-sum games; they are all exchange relationships.

Of course, this is not to say that the actors involved possess equalresources. So, as we saw in Chapter 5, the Prime Minister can create orabolish a department; move the responsibilities for policy areasbetween departments; and appoint and dismiss ministers. Similarly, aminister can impose a policy on a department because s/he alone hasthe authority to make policy and civil servants, even if reluctantly,acknowledge that authority. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister needsthe departments and the minister needs the civil servants. As such, it isan exchange relationship, but most often an asymmetric one.

Relationships within the core executive are not unchanging and,once again, we need to disaggregate the picture across time andbetween departments. As we saw in Chapters 4 and 6, different minis-ters play various roles in their departments. Some are agenda setters,while others are strongly influenced by their departments. Similarly,Prime Ministers interpret their roles differently. So, Thatcher was a par-ticularly interventionist leader; significantly more so than John Major.Overall, our departments’ relations with the Prime Minister, theTreasury and other departments changed differentially over our periodof study.

Even Margaret Thatcher could not intervene everywhere. So, whileshe rarely intervened in Home Office affairs, she was heavily involvedwith the Department of Energy, which was a politically high-profiledepartment in the 1980s as a result of the miners’ strike and the pri-vatisation process. In contrast, her intervention in the DSS or the DTIwas limited, and focused on particular issues, largely because thesedepartments dealt mainly with complex, fairly technical, issues.


The Treasury’s role appears to have changed significantly over therecent past. It has become less involved in the detailed control of expen-diture and more concerned with policy initiatives. This developmentpredates the election of the Labour government, as Deakin and Parry(2000) indicate, but it seems to us that it has accelerated since. In largepart, this results from the particular position of Gordon Brown in theCabinet and his interpretation of his role. At the same time, the Treasuryis playing a more active role in relation to some policy areas, and thussome departments, than to others. So, as we saw in Chapter 5, it is espe-cially active in welfare-to-work policy. As such, the Treasury is closelyinvolved with the DSS, together with the DfEE, the Prime Minister’sOffice and the Cabinet Office, in this area. This development resultsfrom a series of factors, particularly: the government’s emphasis uponthe New Deal as a flagship policy; the fact that the policy is funded fromthe windfall tax, which gives the Treasury a clear interest; and GordonBrown’s commitment to the policy and his interest in its outcome.

The welfare-to-work area also illustrates another key recent develop-ment in the core executive, which, in a sense, is a reaction to oneaspect of the existence of a segmented executive: the move towardsjoined-up government. It has long been a criticism of British centralgovernment that the departmental structure creates ‘policy chimneys’;that departments forward their own interests, see relations betweendepartments in terms of a struggle for resources and, as such, are reluc-tant to co-operate with other departments on issues which cross-cutdepartmental responsibilities. It is also often argued that this is becom-ing a greater problem as issues become increasingly complicated andinterrelated. All governments over the last 25 years have recognisedthis problem and attempted to address it, although to differing degrees(see Kavanagh and Richards 2000a). Nevertheless, it seems to us thatthe current Labour government has taken a qualitatively larger step inthat direction; it has even coined a new term, ‘joined-up government’,to identify the process it deems necessary. It is too early to assess thesuccess of this development, but it is an important one because it doesaddress an important question in relation to the core executive whichdeserves greater attention in the future: to the extent that the coreexecutive is segmented, does this segmentation inhibit effective policy-making and implementation in certain policy areas?

In our view then, the core executive is segmented and departmentsare crucial actors in the exchanges that occur within it. However, it isimportant not to overemphasise the segmentation, because we need torecognise that the relations involved in the core executive are not zero-


sum games. In addition, the current government’s obsession withjoined-up government suggests that segmentation can lead to fragmen-tation and ineffective policy-making and implementation.

A pattern of exchange relations?

For the most part we have already addressed this point, which isperhaps the core of Rhodes’ differentiated polity model. He is surelyright to emphasise that all the relationships involved both within thecore executive and between parts of the core executive and other actorsin the political system are exchange relationships. As we have empha-sised throughout, it is misguided to see those relationships as zero-sumgames. There are some zero-sum games in politics; so if fox hunting isbanned, the anti-hunting lobby will ‘win’ and the pro-hunting lobbywill ‘lose’. However, relations within government and between govern-ment and interest groups are very rarely of this sort because, in suchcases, there are exchange relationships involved. If we take the rela-tionship between a minister and her/his senior civil servants as anexample of such a relationship, then a minister is unlikely consistentlyto push for a line which her/his civil servants oppose because s/heknows that will cause problems in terms of the smooth running of thedepartment. As such, the minister is more likely to proceed slowly,getting the department onside, before initiating significant change; aswe saw in Chapter 7, this is exactly what Peter Lilley did in the DSS.

So, we need to recognise that politics within and outside the coreexecutive is, for the most part, based upon a series of exchange rela-tions. However, we also need to recognise that these relationships areusually asymmetrical. In general, the Prime Minister has moreresources than ministers, ministers have more resources than civil ser-vants and departments more resources than interest groups. Of course,in any given case, we need empirical evidence to demonstrate thatasymmetry. Similarly, the existence of asymmetrical resources does notdetermine outcomes; for example, in our case it depends on whetherthe minister chooses to use those resources and how effectively s/hedoes so. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that asymmetric resourceand power relations are a feature of politics.

A hollowed-out state?

This is one of the areas in which we most clearly part company withRhodes. We are sceptical about the hollowing-out thesis. Of course, ouranalysis does not address all the issues raised by the thesis; in particu-larly we have paid little attention to the extent to which there has


been hollowing-out ‘downwards’, to quangos. However, our evidencesuggests that British central government is still very powerful. We havealready argued that Rhodes probably overestimates the extent to whichthe state is hollowed-out ‘outwards’, certainly to the extent that heprobably gives too much importance to the role of interest groups and,thus, policy networks. Here, we shall pay most attention to the extentto which the power has shifted ‘upwards’, to transnational corpora-tions and international financial markets, as a result of the process ofglobalisation, and to Europe, as a consequence of EU membership.

Of course, each of these questions is broad and each has been thesubject of many monographs. In addition, our evidence is by no meansconclusive; indeed, in relation to the issue of globalisation we have little,if any, direct evidence. Nevertheless, we have a clear view substantiatedby evidence from our interviews. In our view, the current literature onglobalisation pays insufficient attention to domestic politics. Similarly,the literature on the way in which the EU reduces the autonomy of theBritish government neglects the way in which parts of the British coreexecutive have used the EU to forward their own political ends.

In Chapter 9, we briefly reviewed the literature on globalisation.Much of it is poor and it shares with classical Marxism an extreme andindefensible form of economism. The increased globalisation of tradeand financial markets gives governments, including Britain of course,no alternative but to pursue neo-liberal economic policies; and to mostof such globalisation theorists this is a good thing. This analysis is mis-guided for a series of reasons. As we argued in Chapter 9, the extent ofglobalisation is vastly overestimated by such accounts. Trade is region-alised, not globalised, and, while financial markets are increasinglyglobal, they do not impact equally, or in the same way, on differentstates. Consequently, states have considerable autonomy in how theyinterpret the constraints placed upon them by so-called global forces.In Britain, for example, it has been argued convincingly by Watson(2000) that the Blair government interprets, or discursively constructs,the globalisation constraint as almost total because it wants to forwardneo-liberal policies. If it interprets this constraint in this way, it doesnot need to justify its pursuit of neo-liberal policies to its traditionalsupporters who would favour a more social democratic economicpolicy; rather, it can claim that there is no alternative, although not inthese words for obvious reasons. The point is that any analysis of hol-lowing-out which stresses globalisation needs to be much more awareof: the limits to the economic constraints implied by such an analysis;the way that such constraints are mediated by their discursive con-


struction by governments; and the fact that these discursive construc-tions are at least as much a response to the political context with whichthe government is faced as to the economic constraints themselves.

Chapter 9 was most concerned with the way in which Europe con-strains British government because this is central to Rhodes’ argumentconcerning hollowing-out. Again, our argument is more circumspectabout the thesis. In our view, while the EU may constrain British gov-ernment it also offers it opportunities. Most broadly, we would concurwith the argument of Buller (2000), that British governments haveoften used the EU for their own ends. Britain is often seen as anawkward partner in the EU (see George 1998), but, as Buller argues, this is a misleading conceptualisation. The Conservative government’sstance in relation to Europe probably had more to do with domesticpolitics within Britain than it did with Britain’s relations with Europe.The Conservatives used their opposition to Europe to strengthen theirimage of governing competence; they argued they could stand up topowerful forces within Britain, such as the trade unions and particu-larly the NUM, and outside Britain, the bureaucrats in Brussels. In thisway, the EU was an asset to the Conservatives. It may have restrictedtheir autonomy to a limited extent, but it gave them an opponent todefine themselves against; they could pose as the defender of Britainagainst the EU and, as such, as the opponents of Britain’s power beingtransferred to Brussels, or hollowed-out.

The impact of Europe on our departments has been different. The EUclearly presented opportunities for the DTI. Indeed, it is not impossiblethat the DTI would have been abolished, or at the least restructured,but for membership of the EU, given that the growing impact of neo-liberalism meant that the industry side of the Department was particu-larly vulnerable. In contrast, the Home Office has in general resistedefforts to increase EU control in its policy areas. However, even herethe picture is not uniform, because the Home Office has been happy toincrease EU co-ordination of policy on the control of the movement ofdrugs, but strongly opposed to attempts to centralise immigrationpolicy. The general point is clear. Any department’s attitude to the EUand the impact the EU has had on the policy-making process in thatdepartment is strongly affected and mediated by the institutional inter-ests of that department. Once again, it is not a simple relationship; wecannot see the EU simply as a constraint on departments whichrestricts their autonomy.

One other point needs emphasising: ministers, that is agents, matter.Departments have institutional or structural interests that affect their


reaction to, and relations with, the EU. However, a department’s atti-tude to Europe can change when the minister changes. So, as we sawin Chapter 9, the Home Office was more euro-sceptic under Howardand the Department of Employment more euro-sceptic under Portillo,while the Treasury was better disposed to Europe under Clarke.

Overall, we remain unconvinced of the hollowing-out argument; cer-tainly we are much more sceptical than Rhodes. In our view, Britishcentral government retains considerable autonomy; if it has been hollowed-out, it is only to a limited extent.

The meta-theoretical issues

Structure and agency

Our analysis confirms the position we outlined in the introductorychapter. Any analysis of British central government which focusesexclusively on structural or intentional explanation is at best partialand at worst misleading. So, for example, the analyses of the role of thePrime Minister in relation to the core executive which concentrate onindividual Prime Ministers, and in particular on Margaret Thatcher,tend to stress her personality and views and pay insufficient attentionto the structural resources all Prime Ministers possess and the broaderpolitical and economic context in which they operate. As we said inthe introductory chapter, this is a common problem in studies ofBritish politics and it is one shared by most of our interviewees; undueattention is paid to personalities.

Our analysis indicates that actors matter, not only individual PrimeMinisters but also individual ministers. They have different abilitiesand conceptualisations of their roles and they make particular judge-ments about the structural constraints and capabilities within whichthey operate. However, these structural constraints also affect out-comes. To give just one example, the position of the DEn changed dra-matically in the 1980s as it became central to both the conflict withthe NUM and the privatisation process. This potentially gave theSecretary of State a much more important position within the Cabinet.At the same time, it ensured that the Prime Minister took a muchcloser interest in the concerns of the department. So, the structuralresources available to the Secretary of State increased, but only to theextent that he (they were all men) had the ability to use this strongerposition and thus, crucially, gain the respect of Margaret Thatcher. Aswe saw, Nigel Lawson was able to use these resources to exercise con-


siderable autonomy and increase his personal standing within theCabinet. In contrast, in the earlier period, Peter Carrington, faced witha different structural situation in the context of an energy crisis, wasunable to make any mark on the department or on energy policy.

So, any explanation needs to acknowledge the role played by struc-tures and agents. However, we also need to move beyond an additiveapproach; merely emphasising that an explanation must combinesome structural and some intentional elements. Rather, we need toconceptualise the relationship as interactive or dialectical. Agentsoperate within a structural context which constrains or facilitates theiractions. However, these structures do not mechanically constrain orenable the agents; the agents interpret the structural context. In addi-tion, the actions of agents can alter the structures and, sometimes,perhaps often, agents act deliberately to change the constraints. Ourstudy illustrates the utility of such a conceptualisation of the relation-ship between structure and agency. As we saw above, Nigel Lawson hada significant opportunity to influence DEn policy because of theresources that he could utilise given the enhanced role of the depart-ment. However, he would have been unable to use them effectivelywithout his considerable personal ability and, consequently, thebacking of the Prime Minister. Lawson then moved the privatisationprogramme on significantly and, in doing so, both set the parametersfor future Energy secretaries and, ultimately, brought about the demiseof the DEn. Thus, Lawson, as an agent, changed the structural contextwhich future ministers faced.

Our analysis also indicates the role that culture plays in the opera-tion of government departments. However, as we emphasised in theintroduction, the structure/agency literature is not good at dealingwith culture as a variable. In our view, culture often operates like astructure; it constrains or enables the actions of agents. That beingsaid, it is probably better to examine the role of culture by consideringanother interactive or dialectical relationship: that between institu-tions and ideas. It is to that issue which we now turn.

Institutions and ideas

In the introductory chapter, we noted that there is a tendency instudies of British politics not to take ideas seriously; to focus on institu-tions and play down the importance of ideas and culture. We havegone to some length to avoid this problem. Once again, our view isthat this is a dialectical relationship. Institutions affect cultures which


in turn affect institutions. Here, we want to make two key points, thefirst of which returns to an issue raised in the introductory chapter.

In our view, the institutions and process of British government areunderpinned by a particular set of ideas about democracy, which wehave called the British political tradition. More specifically, Britishinstitutions operate on the basis of a leadership conceptualisation ofdemocracy which relies on a conservative notion of responsibility; thecore idea is that government knows best. Here, we are not concernedto defend this basic position which was discussed in the introductorychapter. Rather, we want to argue on the basis of our study of depart-ments that, not surprisingly, this conceptualisation of democracy isshared by members of the core executive. The Whitehall culture bindstogether members of the core executive. Most broadly, the impact ofthis culture is seen in the shared antipathy of civil servants and minis-ters to a radical Freedom of Information Act which has been reflectedin the way in which, during their first term, the Labour government’sproposals have been deradicalised. More narrowly, we saw it in ouranalysis of institutional and cultural change in our departments. Allthe departments are resistant to any move to increase effective scrutinyof their operations; their defence is also a defence of the British politi-cal tradition: departments need to be able to take necessary, if unpopu-lar, decisions without worrying about leaks or constantly having torespond to media or public opinion.

Of course, this argument also bears upon Rhodes’ differentiatedpolity model. A key element of the Rhodes model is its emphasis onthe view that power is more diffused than the Westminster model sug-gests. We shall return to that issue in the next section. However, ourevidence suggests that members of the core executive think both thatpower is concentrated mainly in their hands and that this is how itshould be.

Our analysis of the four departments also indicates the importanceof departmental cultures if we are to explain institutional or policychange. All our departments, except Energy which was only estab-lished in 1974 (and disbanded in 1992), had departmental cultures,although, to an extent, there were different cultures in the Trade andthe Industry sections of the DTI when the Conservatives were electedin 1979. The culture in the Home Office was probably the most embed-ded, because of its status and the fact that governments, even theThatcher government, were reluctant to intervene in this area, wherepolicies could quickly become political. These cultures underpinneddepartmental organisation and clearly affected policy. So, the Home


Office retained a hierarchical organisational structure long after mostother departments and it resisted any move towards neo-conservativepolicies throughout the 1980s.

The key point is not only that cultures affected institutions and poli-cies, but also that such cultures were difficult to change. So, the HomeOffice remained more liberal than would have been expected untilMichael Howard became Home Secretary. Similarly, the key change inthe DSS only occurred with the appointment of Peter Lilley. In con-trast, there was significantly quicker change in the DEn and the DTI.While such departmental cultures are strong, they do change. Changeis obviously likely to be quicker, and probably greater, in departmentswith the least embedded culture; in our case the DEn provides a goodexample. Similarly, change is probably more likely in a departmentwhere there are conflicting sub-cultures, for example, the DTI wherethe Trade section of the department was already strongly predisposedto neo-liberalism. The extent and the speed of change also depend onthe extent of the determination the minister and the Prime Ministerhave to achieve change. As such, change in the DTI was more likelybecause it was more crucial to the Conservative government’s economic policy objectives. Finally, external constraints can lead tochange. In the case of the DSS the great pressure upon it to controlcosts provided a strong constraint which led to both organisationaland policy change.

Ideas matter then; cultures shape institutions and policies. However,cultures change, partly as a result of changing structural constraints andpartly because of the attitudes and actions of agents. When the cultureschange they then become the new context within which institutionsoperate and agents act. It will certainly be interesting to see over thenext ten years, given the outcome of the 2001 election, the extent towhich these new departmental cultures, that reflect Conservativevalues, constrain and are changed by the Labour government.

A pluralist system?

Perhaps the most fundamental question is to what extent power inBritain is concentrated or diffuse. This is not a question which can beresolved by a single study; particularly a study which has not focusedexclusively upon this issue. However, it is a crucial question given ourconcerns in this book and our research does address it. As we arguedabove, Rhodes’ differentiated polity model is a pluralist one; power isdiffuse, it extends beyond the core executive and, in particular, a wide


variety of policy networks play a key role in policy-making. Of course,we need to acknowledge that the differentiated polity model impliesan elite pluralist, or reformed pluralist, position. It gives no role to theelectorate, other than as members of interest groups, and it sees gov-ernment as significantly constrained by particular interests. Even so,our position is less pluralist than Rhodes’.

As we emphasised above, in our view the differentiated polity modeldoes not pay enough attention to the asymmetries of resources andpower. The key characteristic of the British social and economic systemis structured inequality. Our work here barely touches on this issue,although Marsh (2001) has explored it elsewhere. What we have seen,however, is how that structured inequality is reflected in access topolitical resources. There is abundant evidence that members of thecore executive are drawn from a limited section of society; they areoverwhelmingly white, middle class and male (see Marsh 2001;Kavanagh and Richards 2000b). At the same time, the groups whichdominate the tightest policy networks are drawn from professional andeconomic interests which are also white, middle class and male. So, itis individuals drawn from privileged backgrounds who dominateBritish policy-making. Of course, we cannot assume that such individ-uals inevitably share common interests which they forward when theymake policy. This needs to be investigated empirically and will be thefocus of another book. However, we can say that the British systemdoes exhibit clear asymmetries of resources, including access to posi-tions in which key political decisions are taken. In addition, we haveargued that the core executive in Britain is less constrained by otheractors than many people, including Rhodes, suggest. Overall, we wouldcontend that if the distribution of power in Britain is a pluralist one,this is so only in a very limited sense.

Towards an asymmetric power model

Our model has six main features which we will briefly discuss here, butwhich stem clearly from our critique of the differentiated power modelbased upon our empirical material. In our view, the British polity ischaracterised by:

• a society which is marked by continuing patterns of structuredinequality;

• A British political tradition which emphasises the view that ‘govern-ment knows best’;

• asymmetries of power;


• exchange relationships between actors in the system of governance;• a strong, if segmented, executive;• limited external constraints on executive power.

Structured inequality

In our view, too many students of British politics neglect the broadersocio-economic structural context within which politics takes place.We are not developing an economistic argument here; one clearlycannot read off political outcomes on the basis of a knowledge of thepattern of structural inequalities in Britain. However, those inequalitiesare a crucial aspect of the context within which British politics takesplace. Moreover, they constrain and facilitate the actions, and thelikely success, of individuals and interest groups in the British polity.Far too much work on British politics focuses exclusively on agents andoften appears to assume that the playing field on which they competeis level. In contrast, we would argue that to conceptualise British poli-tics more adequately one needs to start with an appreciation that it isnot a level playing field and that there are enduring slopes and gullieswhich favour some interests over others.

The British political tradition

The institutions and processes of British politics are underpinned by aview of democracy which stresses a limited liberal notion of representa-tion – here the emphasis is upon the holding of periodic, relatively freeand fair elections – and a conservative notion of responsibility – herethe emphasis is on the need for strong and decisive, rather thanresponsive, government. Of course, both the British political traditionand the Westminster model present a false picture of how the Britishpolitical system works. The key features – parliamentary sovereignty,ministerial responsibility and collective responsibility – do not func-tion as the model suggest. However, unsurprisingly, it is the view ofdemocracy shared by the actors in the core executive; it legitimisestheir authority and power. As such, it affects how the political systemworks. It has shaped the process of constitutional and organisationalreform and it continues to maintain elite rule. The code that underpinsthe British political system is still one that emphasises that Whitehall,that is the core executive, ‘knows best’. The Scott affair, the BSE crisisand Labour’s retrenchment on freedom of information all illustrate thecontinuing strength of self-belief within the system.


Asymmetric power

There are crucial asymmetries of power in the British political system.We would agree with Rhodes that resources have, to an extent, shiftedaway from the core executive to other actors and that the process ofgoverning has become more complex. Increasingly, the delivery ofpublic goods does involve the creation of networks including govern-ment, regulators and private and third-sector actors. However, whilstthe government is often dependent on these organisations for thedelivery of the service, they continue to depend on the governmentwhich has a unique set of resources – force, legitimacy, state bureau-cracy, tax-raising powers and legislation – which are unavailable toother actors. Thus, the relationship between the government and mostother interests remains asymmetrical. The government effectively sanc-tions membership of networks and has a number of mechanisms forreasserting control where necessary. Only interests which themselveshave crucial resources, and we would argue that these are invariablyeconomic or professional interests, have consistent privileged access to,and influence over, government.

A pattern of exchange relationships

Like Rhodes, we accept that power is not zero-sum but involvesexchange relationship based upon patterns of dependence. Privatecompanies, transnational organisation, voluntary organisations,quangos and agencies are involved in a process of exchange with dif-ferent levels or sections of government. However, the continuedstrength of the executive and its control of significant resources meansthat, whilst the government sometimes fails to get its way, it still con-tinues to win much (we would argue most) of the time. Moreover,whilst external and internal changes have changed the process of thedelivery of public goods, the central state, directly and indirectly, stillhas significant influence on how and what services are delivered.

A strong and segmented executive

Despite recent changes, Britain retains a strong executive. The coreexecutive is clearly not a unified whole and Rhodes is surely right toemphasise its segmented character. However, power continues to beconcentrated within the core executive and the majority of policy deci-sions are made at departmental level. Indeed, there have been recentmoves to (re)assert greater central government authority in policy andorganisational terms. So, to cite a policy example, the last Conservative


administration attempted to assert central control over educationpolicy and this move has continued under Labour. Following the intro-duction by the Conservatives of a national curriculum, Labour hasincreased state control with a growing emphasis on standards and bythe creation of procedures to allow direct intervention by central gov-ernment to improve schools, bypassing the Local EducationAuthorities (see McCaig 2001). Similarly, in the organisational field,the emphasis on ‘joined-up’ government, which we dealt with inChapter 8, is, in large part, an attempt to reimpose central executivecontrol on diverse institutions of governance.

Despite attempts to ‘join-up’ government, departments continue tosegment the operation of the executive. We contend that any analysisof the British political system needs to recognise that departments areboth the key actors and institutions at the centre of the policy-makingprocess. They continue to provide the foci in which policy is made.Thus, although we acknowledge that changes brought about by gover-nance have altered both the actors and the distribution of resources inthe policy-making arena, most resources remain concentrated withinWhitehall departments. So, it is important to recognise that depart-ments continue to provide the key terrain in which power can belocated within the British political system.

A limited pattern of external constraints

We do not deny that the pattern of external constraints on governmentis changing. It is clearly the case, for example, that governments canonly have limited, if any, impact on international financial markets.However, we must be wary of becoming carried away by such argu-ments for a number of reasons. First, governments have always beenconstrained. Second, governments can be strategic whilst marketscannot. Third, markets are dependent on government. Fourth, citizensare still subject to considerable state power. Thus, the relationshipbetween global and national forces is contingent and interactive, notdetermined, and the British government still has considerable options.For example, whilst the EU, for instance, may be an important con-straint, the government continues to play a central role in mediatingthat constraint. Indeed, Castells (1998: 330) argues that the EU is suc-cessful precisely because ‘[it] does not supplant the existing nationsstates but, on the contrary, is a fundamental instrument for their sur-vival on the condition of conceding shares of sovereignty in exchangefor a greater say in world, and domestic affairs’. Like power, state–global


relations cannot be conceived in zero-sum terms. It is a process whichhas the potential for a range of outcomes depending on the choices ofactors and the nature of existing institutions. As we argued in relationto both globalisation and the EU, such ‘constraints’ also provide oppor-tunities for strategically calculating governments.

Conclusion

Rhodes’ differentiated polity model certainly offers a more coherentconceptualisation of British politics than previous views. In particular,Rhodes’ emphasis that politics involves exchange relationships andthat power relations are rarely zero-sum marks an important advanceon the Westminster model. However, we are less convinced thanRhodes that the power of the core executive in Britain has beensignificantly weakened; that the British state has been hollowed-out.While we acknowledge that the broader context within which Britishgovernments operate is more complex than in the past, it needs to berecognised that this context, and processes such as globalisation andEuropeanisation, can provide opportunities as well as acting as con-straints. However, our main criticism of the differentiated polity modelis with its inherent pluralism. We do not deny that there is a certainplurality in the policy-making process or, as we argued, that powermost often involves exchange relations. But, these are rarely exchangesbetween equals. One of the big problems with most analyses of Britishpolitics is that they privilege agents and downplay the effect of struc-ture. Politics does not occur on a level playing field as the pluralistswould have us believe. Rather, the field has slopes and gullies that sys-tematically facilitate some interests and constrain others. To put itanother way, British politics may be characterised by plurality, but itdoes not reflect a pluralist power structure. In our view, the powerstructure is asymmetric and we need to acknowledge and explore thatasymmetry.

Appendix on Methods

To date there have been two types of studies of government departments. Thereare a few analyses that attempt to cover all departments. These are either merelydescriptive (see Chester and Wilson 1968; McLean et al. 2000) or quantitative(especially Hood and Dunsire 1981). There are more studies of individualdepartments; although most of these are either descriptive or partial. In con-trast, we adopt a comparative case-study approach; comparing and contrastingchange in a limited number of departments (on the comparative case studymethod see Yin 1984).

However, before justifying our choice of departments, it is worth a brief con-sideration of a broader problem. As Hogwood (1992) points out, there is littleagreement as to the number of departments. So, Hood and Dunsire (1981: 40)argue that: ‘the question is a deep legal (indeed philosophical) one and there iscertainly no single and all-encompassing definition of such a thing’. This isdemonstrated by the plethora of definitions of, and schemas for, classifyinggovernment departments. Many authors include only the departments whichare headed by Cabinet ministers (see Rose 1987; and for similar lists seeMadgwick 1991: 20; Clarke 1975: 65; Hennessy 1989). Such lists, however, arepartial. In contrast, a number of authors have offered much more comprehen-sive definitions of government departments (Dewry and Butcher 1988;Dunleavy 1989; Hood et al. 1978; Hood and Dunsire 1981; Pitt and Smith 1981;Pollitt 1984). Dunleavy (1989: 273), for instance, disaggregates departments,recognising that many have departmental agencies attached. Consequently, heidentifies 44 ‘ministerial departments (and elements of)’ and lists a further 38‘non-ministerial departments, departmental agencies, and other semi-detachedagencies etc.’

Hood et al. (1978), when beginning their research into the management ofgovernment, soon found that there was ‘no single or self evident definition of“a central government agency” in Britain’. They point out that different govern-ment lists offer varying lists of agencies that are attached to departments and,perhaps most ironically, the departments listed in the Treasury’s ‘Memorandumon the Estimates’: ‘are by no means the same Departments which actuallyappear in the estimates’ (Hood et al. 1978). Consequently, they distinguishbetween departments which are 5 star, i.e. the departments which appear on allfive departmental lists, and departments which are 4 star appearing on four etc.They finally accept a total of 69 departments.

In the end this debate can seem arcane so we settled for the most obvious list;that published in the Civil Service Year Book. In 1993, this listed 61 departmentsof which 19 were headed by Cabinet ministers, with a further two, the LawOfficer’s Department and the Lord Advocate’s Department, defined asDepartments of the State. Given this list we were still spoilt for choice. We hada clear resource constraint that suggested that we could undertake a study ofonly four departments. Obviously, no four departments could be regarded asrepresentative. However, we wanted a spread of departments to ensure that anygeneral conclusions we reached weren’t the product of choosing departments

251

that were of the same type. Of course, any choice involves establishing criteria.Our starting point was Richard Rose’s classification (1987) of departmentswhich, in our view, is the most accessible. He categorises departments accordingto their dates of origin, resource claims and political status. His analysis focusesmainly on the period between 1945 and 1983. Of course, this means that it isdated. Some of the departments he identifies have been amalgamated (e.g.Employment and Education; Transport and Environment) and others disbanded(e.g. Energy). At the same time, the creation of separate Executive Agencies hassignificantly altered the pattern of resource claims. In addition, the politicalstatus of departments clearly fluctuates. So, for example, Hoopes’ (1996) studyof oil privatisation gives ample evidence that the political status of theDepartment of Energy fluctuated significantly between its creation in 1974 andits dismantling in 1993.

Nevertheless, Rose’s classification is a useful starting point. Figure A.1 isadapted from Rose (1987) and summarises his classification of those depart-ments that existed in 1983. We wanted a spread of departments that reflectedRose’s criteria but, given that a key focus of our research was structural and cul-tural change, we also wanted most of our departments to be ones which hadexperienced significant structural change. Consequently, we decided upon thefollowing departments: the Home Office; the Department of Trade andIndustry; the Department of Social Security; and the, now dismantled,Department of Energy. As such, we had one of the main departments of state,the Home Office, which ranks high in relation to all Rose’s criteria, but that hasexperienced relatively few structural changes. In contrast, the DTI, according toRose (1987: 49, Table 2.5) is a department characterised by almost constantchange; it had twice as many transfers of function between 1946 and 1983 as

252 Appendix

Figure A.1 Classifying government departments

Department Date of Resource Political origin (1) claims (2) status (3)

Treasury Old High HighDefence Old High MediumTrade in Industry Old Medium HighForeign Old Medium HighHome Office Old High HighHealth/Social Security Middle-aged/New (4) High MediumEducation Middle-aged Medium LowEnvironment Middle-aged Medium MediumScotland Middle-aged Medium MediumAgriculture Middle-aged Low LowEmployment Middle-aged Low MediumTransport New Medium MediumEnergy New Low MediumWales New Low LowNorthern Ireland New Low Medium

any other department. It was split into three in 1974 with the creation of aDepartment of Industry, a Department of Trade and a Department of ConsumerAffairs. Subsequently, it was recreated in 1983. In Rose’s classification, the DTI isan old ministry with medium resource claims and high political status,although it is probably fairer to claim that its political status has fluctuated. TheDepartment of Social Security has also experienced significant changes. It wassplit from Health in 1988 and was very affected by the move to ExecutiveAgencies. In Rose’s terms, it is young, with high resource claims and a mediumpolitical status. The Department of Energy was a very small department that wascreated in 1974 and amalgamated with the DTI in 1993. In Rose’s classificationit was new with low resource claims and medium political status. However, theminers’ strike in 1984 and the privatisations in the 1980s subsequently gave it avery high political profile. Overall, the four departments upon which we focusgive us a good spread of government departments and particularly of thosewhich have experienced structural change.

We initially collected quantitative data on the size, functions, budgets andorganisation of the four departments. This was mainly taken from official publi-cations, although we also had limited access to a number of internal, unpub-lished government documents. However, the main source of material used inthis book is drawn from 191 semi-structured interviews we conducted with min-isters, civil servants and interest group representatives (see Figure A.2) whobetween 1974 and 1997 had an association with our four departments. Theinterviews were conducted between October 1995 and August 1998.

Appendix 253

Figure A.2 The interviewees

Civil servantsGrade Retired Contemporary

1/1A 20 52 27 133 16 275 12 267/HEO 8

Cabinet ministers Interest group reps22 25

Total interviewed 191

Bibliography

Adonis, A. and Hames, T. (1994) The Thatcher-Reagan Revolution, Manchester:Manchester University Press.

Alveson, M. (1995) Cultural Perspectives on Organizations, Cambridge: CambridgeUnviersity Press.

Artis, M. J. (1998) ‘The United Kingdom’, in J. Forder and A. Menon (eds), TheEuropean Union and National Macroeconomic Policy, London: Routledge.

Auction, P. (1990) ‘Adminstrative Reforms in Public Managment: Paradigms,Principles, Paradoxes and Pendulums’, Governance, 3(2), 115–37.

Bache, I. (1996) ‘EU Regional Policy: Has the UK Government Succeeded inPlaying the Gatekeeper Role Over the Domestic Impact of the EuropeanRegional Fund?’ PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield.

Baker, A. (1997) ‘The Transnationalisation of the Core Executive in the UK: theCase of HM Treasury’s International Finance Directorate’, paper presented atthe ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Bern, 27 March–4 April.

Baker, K. (1993) The Turbulent Years: My Life in Politics, London: Faber and Faber.Bale, T. (1999) Sacred Cows and Common Sense, Aldershot: Ashgate.Balogh, T. (1959) ‘The Apotheosis of the Dilettante: the Establishment of

Mandarins’, in H. Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: a Symposium, London:Anthony Blond.

Barberis, P. (1996) The Elite of the Elite: Permanent Secretaries in the British HigherCivil Service Aldershot: Dartmouth.

Barker, A. and Wilson, G. (1997) ‘Whitehall’s Disobedient Servants? SeniorOfficials’ Potential Resistance to Ministers in British GovernmentDepartments’, British Journal of Political Science, 27, 223–46.

Beer, S. (1982) Britain Against Itself, London: Faber.Bender, B. (1991) ‘Governmental Processes: Whitehall, Central Government and

1992’, Public Policy and Administration, 6, 13–21.Benn, T. (1980) Arguments for Socialism, London: Jonathan Cape.Benn, T. (1990), Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, London: Arrow.Benson, J. K. (1977) ‘Organizations: a Dialetical View’, Administrative Science

Quarterly, 22, 1–21.Benyon, J. (1993) Law and Order Review 1993: an Audit of Crime, Policing and

Criminal Justice Issues, Leicester: Centre for the Study of Public Order.Berger P. and Luckman, T. (1967) The Social Construction of Reality,

Harmondsworth: Penguin.Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (2001) Interpreting British Governance, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Birch, A. (1964) Representative and Responsible Government, London: Allen and

Unwin.Birch, M. and Holliday, I. (1996) The British Cabinet System, Hemel Hempstead:

Prentice Hall.Blackstone, T. and Plowden, W. (1988) Inside the Think-tanks: Advising the British

Cabinet 1971–83, London: William Heinemann.

254

Bradshaw, J. (1992), ‘Social Security’, in D. Marsh and R. Rhodes (eds),Implementing Thatcherite Policies: Audit of an Era, Buckingham: OpenUniversity Press.

Breton, A. and Wintrobe, R. (1974) The Logic of Bureaucratic Control: an EconomicAnalysis of Competition, Exchange and Efficiency in Private and PublicOrganisations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Breton, A. and Wintrobe, R. (1982) The Logic of Bureaucratic Control: an EconomicAnalysis of Competition, Exchange and Efficiency in Private and PublicOrganisations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bridges, Lord (1964) The Treasury, London: George Allen and Unwin.Brittan, S. (1964) The Treasury Under the Tories, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Brittan, S. (1971) Steering the Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Brittan, S. (1975), ‘The Economic Contradictions of Democracy’, British Journal

of Political Science, 5(2), 129–59.Brittan, S. (1979) Participation without Politics, London: Institute for Economic

Affairs.Bruce-Gardyne, J. and Lawson, N. (1976) The Power Game, Basingstoke:

Macmillan – now Palgrave.Buller, J. (2000) ‘The Advantage of “Tying One’s Hands”: Rules, Autonomy and

the Europeanisation of British Economic Policy’, paper presented at PSAannual conference, LSE, 10–13 April.

Buller, J. and Smith, M. J. (1998) ‘Civil Service Attitudes to the EuropeanUnion’, in D. Baker and D. Seawright (eds), Britain: For and Against Europe,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bulmer, S. and Burch, M. (1998) ‘Organizing for Europe: Whitehall, the BritishState and the European Union’, Public Administration, 76, 601–28.

Bulpitt, J. (1983) Territory and Power in the United Kingdom, Manchester:Manchester University Press.

Bulpitt, J, (1986) ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’sDomestic Statecraft’, Political Studies, 34, 19–39.

Bulpitt, J. (1988) ‘Rational Politicians and Conservative Statecraft in an OpenPolitiy’, in P. Byrd (ed.), British Foreign Policy Under Thatcher, Deddington:Philip Allen.

Burrell, G. (1998) ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis: theContribution of Michel Foucault’, in A. McKinlay and K. Starkey (eds),Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, London: Sage.

Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979) Sociological Paradigms and OrganizationalAnalysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life, London: Heinemann.

Burt, R. S., Gabbay, S. M., Holt, G. and Moran, P. (1994) ‘ContingentOrganization as a Network Theory: the Culture-Performance ContingencyFunction’, Acta Sociologica, 37, 345–70.

Butcher, T. (1995) Delivering Welfare: the Governance of the Social Services in the1990s, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Cabinet Office (1996), The Civil Service Yearbook 1996, London: HMSO.Callaghan, J. (1982), ‘Cumber and Variables’, in The Home Office: Perspectives on

Policy and Administration Bicentenary Lectures 1982, London: RIPA.Callaghan, J. (1987) Time and Chance, London: Collins.Campbell, C. and Wilson, G. (1995) The End of Whitehall: Death of a Paradigm,

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bibliography 255

Carrington, P. (1988) Reflect on Things Past, London: Collins.Carruthers, B. G. (1994) ‘When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organ-

ization Theory and the Political Sociology of the State’, Sociological Theory,12, 19–44.

Castells, M. (1998) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol III: Endof Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell.

Castle, B. (1984) The Castle Diaries 1964–70, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Cerny, P. (1990) The Changing Architecture of the State, London: Sage.Chapman, J. (1999) ‘The Policy Process and the Decline of the Deep Mine Coal

Industry, 1965–95’, Unpublished PhD, University of Sheffield.Chapman, R. A. (1988) Ethics in the British Civil Service, London: Routledge.Chapman, R. A. (1997) The Treasury in Public Policy Making, London: Routledge. Chester, D. N. and Wilson, F. M. G. (1968) The Organisation of British Central

Government, 1914–1964, London: Allen and Unwin.Child, J. (1972) ‘Organizational Structure, Environment and Performance: the

Role of Strategic Choice’, Sociology, 6, 1–22.Clarke, R. (1975) ‘The Machinery of Government’, in W. Thornhill (ed.), The

Modernization of British Government, London: Pitman.Clegg, S. (1990) Modern Organisations: Organisation Studies in the Postmodern

World, London: Sage.Clegg, S. (1998) ‘Foucault, Power and Organizations’ in A. McKinlay and

K. Starkey (eds), Foucault, Management and Organization Theory, London:Sage.

Clifford, J. (1983) ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, Representations, 1, 118–46.Cm 2627 (1992) Continuity and Change in the Civil Service, London: HMSO.Cmnd 4506 (1970), The Reorganisation of Central Government, London: HMSO.Cmnd 9517 (1985), Reform of Social Security, Department of Health and Social

Security, London: HMSO. Cmnd 9691 (1985), Reform of Social Security: Programme for Action, Department of

Health and Social Security, London: HMSO. Coates, D. (1980) Labour in Power?, London: Longman.Coates, D. (1989), The Crisis of Labour: Industrial Relations and the State in

Contemporary Britain, London: Longman.Cockett, R. (1995) Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-tanks and the Economic

Counter-revolution, London: Fontana.Cortell, A. P. and Peterson, S. (1997) ‘Altered States: Explaining Domestic

Institutional Change’, mimeo.Cram, L. (1997) Policy-Making in the European Union, London: Routledge.Cronin, J. (1991) The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in

Twentieth-Century Britain, London: Routledge.Cross, J. A. (1970) British Public Administration, London: University Tutorial

Press.Crossman, R. (1972a) Inside View, London: Jonathan Cape.Crossman, R. (1972b) The Myths of Cabinet Government, Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard University Press.Crossman, R. (1975) The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume 1, Minister of

Housing, London: Hamilton and Cape.Daintith, T. and Page, E. (1999) The Executive in the Constitution, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

256 Bibliography

Dale, H. E. (1941) The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Deakin, N. and Parry, R. (2000) The Treasury and Social Policy, Basingstoke:Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Department of Trade and Industry (1983) ‘History and Composition of theBoard of Trade’, mimeo, London: DTI.

Devine, F. (1995) ‘Qualitative Methods’, in D. Marsh, and G. Stoker (eds),Theories and Methods in Political Science, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

DiMaggio, P. J. and Powell, W. W. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in W. W. Powell and P. J. DiMaggio (eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dolowitz, W. and Marsh, D. (1996) ‘Who Learns What From Whom: a Reviewof the Policy Transfer Literature’, Political Studies, 44, 343–57.

Dolowitz, W. and Marsh, D. (2000) ‘Learning from Abroad: the Role of PolicyTransfer in Contemporary Policy- Making’, Governance 13 (1), 5–23.

Dolowitz, D., Marsh, D., O’Neil, F. and Richards, D. (1996) ‘Thatcherism and the3 “Rs”: Radicalism, Realism and Rhetoric in the Third Term of the ThatcherGovernment’, Parliamentary Affairs, 49(3), 455–79.

Donaldson, L. (1996) For Positivist Organization Theory, London: Sage.Donoughue, P. (1987) Prime Minister: the Conduct of Policy Under Harold Wilson

and James Callaghan, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Douglas, M. (1982) In the Active Voice, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Dowding, K. (1995) The Civil Service, London: Routledge.Drewry, G. and Butcher, T. (1988) The Civil Service Today, Oxford: Blackwell.DTI (1995) Implementing the Civil Service White Papers in the Department of Trade

and Industry, London: DTI.Dudley, G. and Richardson, J. (1996) ‘Promiscuous and Celibate Ministerial

Styles: Policy Changes, Policy Network, and UK Roads Policy’, Essex Papers inPolitics and Government No. 107, Colchester: University of Essex.

Dunleavy, P. (1989) ‘The Architecture of the British Central State, Part I:Framework for Analysis’, Public Administration, 67, 3, 391–417.

Dunleavy, P. (1991) Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice, HemelHempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Dunleavy, P. (1995) ‘Estimating the Distribution of Positional Influence inCabinet Committees under Major’, in R. A. W. Rhodes and P. Dunleavy (eds),Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive, Basingstoke: Macmillan – nowPalgrave.

Dyrberg, T. B. (1997) The Circular Structure of Power, London: Verso.Emmerson, H. (1956) The Ministry of Works, London: George Allen and Unwin.English R. and Kenny, M. (2000) Rethinking British Decline, Basingstoke:

Macmillan – now Palgrave.Evans, M., Piachaud, D. and Sutherland, H. (1994), ‘Designed for the Poor –

Poorer by Design? The Effects of the 1986 Social Security Act on FamilyIncomes’, STICERD Welfare State Programme Discussion Paper, WSP/105,London: London School of Economics.

Fitzgerald, T. H. (1988) ‘Can Change in Organizational Culture Really beManaged?’ Organizational Dynamics, 18, 4–16.

Flinders, M. (2000) ‘The Politics of Accountablity’, PhD, University of Sheffield.

Bibliography 257

Flinders, M. and Smith, M. J. (1998) Quangos, Accountablity and Reform,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Foley, M. (1992) The Rise of the British Presidency, Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.

Foster, C. D. (1997) A Stronger Centre of Government, London: ConstitutionalUnit.

Foster, C. and Plowden, F. (1996) The State Under Stress, Buckingham: OpenUniversity Press.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, New York: RandomHouse.

Fowler, N. (1991) Ministers Decide, London: Chapman.Franklin, B. (2001) ‘The Hand of History: New Labour, News Management and

Governance’, in S. Ludlam and M. J. Smith (eds), New Labour in GovernmentBasingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Frost, P. J., Moore, L. F., Louis, M. R., Lundberg, C. C. and Martin, J. (1983) ‘AnAllegorical View of Organizational Culture’, in P. J. Frost (ed.), OrganizationalCulture, California: Sage.

Fry, G. (1984) ‘The Development of the Government’s Grand Strategy for CivilService Reform’, Public Administration, 62.

Fry, G. (1993) Reforming the Civil Service: the Fulton Committee in the British HomeCivil Service 1966–68, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fry, G. (1995) Policy and Management in the British Civil Service, HemelHempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf

Furlong, P. and Marsh, D. (2001) ‘A Skin not a Pullover: Ontology andEpistemology in Political Science’, in D. Marsh and G. Stoker (eds), Theory andMethods in Polotical Science, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Gains, F. (2000) ‘Understanding Department-Next Steps Relationships’, PhD,University of Sheffield.

Gamble, A. (1994), The Free Economy and the Strong State, Basingstoke: Macmillan– now Palgrave.

Gamble A. (1999) ‘State, Economy and Society’, in I. Holliday, A. Gamble andG. Parry (eds), Fundamentals in British Politics, Basingstoke: Macmillan – nowPalgrave.

Gamble, A. and Payne, A. (1996) Regionalism and World Order, Basingstoke:Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Oxford: Polity.George, S. (1998) An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Giddens, A. (1986) The Consitution of Society, Oxford: Polity Press.Gilmour, I. (1992) Whatever Happened to the Conservative Party?, London: Fourth

Estate.Glennerster, H. (1995) British Social Policy since 1945, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Goffman, E. (1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth:

Penguin.Grant, W. (1978) ‘Insider Groups, Outsider Groups and Interest Group Strategies

in Britain’, University of Warwick, Department of Politics Working Paper No. 32.

Grant, W. (1995) Business and Politics, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

258 Bibliography

Green, D. and Shapiro, I. (1994) Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, NewHaven, Yale Univeristy Press.

Greer, P. (1994) Transforming Central Government: the Next Steps Initiative,Buckingham: Open University Press.

Grugel, J. and Hout, W. (1999) ‘Regions, Regionalism and the South’, in J. Grugel and W. Hout (eds), Regionalism Across the North-South Divide,London: Routledge.

Haines, J. (1977) The Politics & Power, London: Cape.Hall, P. and Taylor, R. (1996) ‘Political Science and the Three Institutionalisms’,

Political Studies, 44, 936–57.Hall, S. (1985), ‘Authoritarian Populism: a Reply’, New Left Review, 151,

112–24.Hay, C. (1995) ‘Structure and Agency’, in D. Marsh and G. Stoker (eds), Theories

and Methods in Political Science, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Hay, C. (1996), Restating Social and Political Change, Buckingham: Open

University Press.Hay, C. (1997a), ‘Political Time and the Temporality of Crisis’, Paper presented

at Institute of Western Europe, Columbia University, New York, 25 January.Hay, C. (1997b), ‘Anticipating Accommodations: the Appeasement of Capital in

the “Modernisation” of the British Labour Party, 1987–92’, Politics and Society,25(2), 234–56.

Hay, C. and Richards, D. (2000) ‘The Tangled Webs of Westminster andWhitehall: the Discourse, Strategy and Practice of Networking within theBritish Core Executive’, Public Administration, 78, 1, 1–28.

Hay, C. and Watson, M. (1998) ‘Rendering the Contingent Necessary: New Labour’s Neo-liberal Conversion and the Discourse of Globalisation’,Center for European Studies Working Paper 8.4, Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press.

Headey, B. (1974) British Cabinet Ministers, London: George Allen and Unwin.Heath, E. (1998) The Course of my Life: the Autobiography of Edward Heath,

London: Hodder and Stoughton.Heclo, H. and Wildavsky, A. (1974) The Private Government of Public Money,

Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Heclo, H. and Wildavsky, A. (1981) 2nd edition, The Private Government of Public

Money, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global

Transformations, Oxford: Polity.Hennessy, P. (1986) Cabinet, Oxford: Blackwell.Hennessy, P. (1989) Whitehall, London: Fontana Press. Hennessy, P. (1998) ‘The Blair Style of Government: an Historical Perspective

and an Interim Audit’, Government and Opposition, 33, pp. 3–20.Hennessy, P., Hughes, R. and Seaton, J. (1997) Ready, Steady, Go! New Labour and

Whitehall, London: Fabian Society.Heseltine, M. (1987) Where There’s a Will, London: Hutchinson.Hindmoor, A. (1998) ‘The Importance of Being Trusted: Transaction Costs and

Policy Networks’, Public Administration, 76, 25–43.Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1996) Globalisation in Question, Cambridge: Polity.Hogg, S. and Hill, J. (1995) Too Close to Call, London: Little, Brown.

Bibliography 259

Hogwood, B. (1988), ‘The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Department of Trade andIndustry’, in C. Campbell and B. G. Peters (eds), Organizing Governance:Governing Organisation, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Hogwood, B. (1992) ‘Government Departments’, mimeo, University ofStrathclyde.

Hogwood, B. (1997) ‘The Machinery of Government’, Political Studies, 45(4),704–15.

Hood, C. (1990) ‘Control Over Bureaucracy: Cultural Theory and InstitutionalVariety’, Journal of Public Policy, 15, 207–30.

Hood, C. (1991) ‘A New Public Management for all Seasons’, PublicAdministration, 69, 3–19.

Hood, C. (1998) The Art of the State, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hood, C. and Dunsire, A. (1981) Bureaumetrics, Farnborough: Gower.Hood, C., Dunsire, A. and Thompson, S. (1978) ‘So You Think You Know

What Government Departments Are?’, Public Administration Bulletin, 27,20–32.

Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalisation and the Postcolonial World, Basingstoke:Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Hoopes, S. (1996) Oil Privatization, Public Choice and International Force,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Horn, M. (1995) The Political Economy of Public Administration, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Hoskyns, J. (1983) ‘Whitehall and Westminster’, Parliamentary Affairs, 36.Howard, A. (1987), RAB: the Life of R. A. Butler, London: Jonathan Cape.Howell, D. (1970) A New Style of Government, London: Conservative Political

Centre.James, S. (1992) British Cabinet Government, London: Routledge.Jay, P. (1977) ‘Englanditis’, in R. E. Tyrell (ed.), The Future That Doesn’t Work,

New York: Doubleday.Jenkins, G. (1959) The Ministery of Transport and Civil Aviation, London: George

Allen and Unwin.Jenkins, R. (1991) A Life at the Centre, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Jennings, R. F. (1977) Education and Politics, London: Batsford.Jensen, L. (1998) ‘Cultural Theory and Democratizing Functional Domains: the

Case of Danish Housing’, Public Administration, 76, 117–39.Jessop, B. (1974) Traditionalism, Conservatism and British Political Culture,

London: Allen and Unwin.Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S. and Ling, T. (1988), Thatcherism: a Tale of

Two Nations, Cambridge: Polity Press.Judge, D. (1993) The Parliamentary State, London: Sage.Judge, D. (1999) Representation, London: Routledge.Kandiah, M. and Seldon, A. (1996) Ideas and Think Tanks in Contemporary Britain

Volumes 1 & 2, London: Frank Cass.Kaufman, G. (1997) How to be a Minister, London: Faber and Faber.Kavanagh, D. (1987) Thatcherism and British Politics: the End of Consensus?,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Kavanagh, D. (1997) The Reordering of British Politics, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

260 Bibliography

Kavanagh, D. and Richards, D. (2000a) ‘Departmentalism and Joined-UpGovernment: Back to the Future?’, Parliamentary Affairs, September, 53(4).

Kavanagh, D. and Richards, D. (2000b) ‘Prime Ministers, Ministers and CivilServants in Britain’, paper presented at the World Congress of IPSA, QuebecCity, Canada, 1–5 August.

Kavanagh, D. and Seldon, A. (1999) The Powers behind the Prime Minister,London: Harper Collins.

Kellner, P. and Crowther Hunt, N. (1980) The Civil Service: an Enquiry intoBritain’s Ruling Class, London: Macdonald.

Kenny, M. (1999) ‘Ideas, Ideologies and the British Political Tradition’, in I.Holliday, A. Gamble and G. Parry (eds), Fundamentals in British Politics,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

King, A. (1975) ‘Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s’, Political Studies,23 (2/3), 284–96.

King A. (1985) The British Prime Minister, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Kingdom, J. (1999) Government and Politics in Britain, Oxford: Polity.Klein, R. (1989) The Politics of the NHS, London: Longman.Klymlicka, W. (1999) ‘Citizenship in an Era of Globalization’, in I. Shapiro and

C. Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy’s Edges, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Kogan, M. (1971) Educational Policy Making, London: Allen and Unwin.Lawson, N. (1992) The View from No. 11, London: Bantam Press.Lee, J., Jones, G. and Burnham, J. (1998) Government at the Centre, Basingstoke:

Macmillan – now Palgrave.Legg, T. and Ibbs, R. (1998) Report of the Sierra Leone Arms Investigation, London:

HMSO.Ling, T. (1998) The British State Since 1945, London: Polity Press.Louis, M. R. (1985) ‘An Investigator’s Guide to Workplace Culture’ in P. J. Frost

(ed.), Organizational Culture, California: Sage.Lowndes, V. (1996) ‘Varieties of the New Institutionalism: a Critical Appraisal’,

Public Administration, 74: 181–97.Ludlam, S. and Smith, M. J. (1996) Contemporary British Conservatism,

Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave. Madgwick, P. (1991) British Government: the Central Executive Territory, London:

Philip Allen.March J. and Olsen, J. (1984) ‘The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors

in Political Life’, American Political Science Review, 78, 734–49.Marquand, D. (1988) The Unprincipled Society: New Demands and Old Politics,

London: Fontana.Marr, A. (1995) Ruling Britannia: the Failure of British Democracy,

Harmondsworth: Penguin.Marsh, D. (1980) The British Political Tradition, University of Essex, Mimeo.Marsh, D. (1996) ‘Explaining “Thatcherite” Policies: Beyond Uni-dimensional

Explanation’, Political Studies, 43(1).Marsh, D. (1998) Comparing Policy Networks, Milton Keynes: Open University

Press.Marsh, D. (2001) ‘It’s Always the Happy Hour for Men with Money, Knowledge

and Power: Beyond Pluralism as the Approach to the Study of British Politics’,in C. Hay (ed.), British Politics Today, Oxford: Polity.

Bibliography 261

Marsh, D. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (1992a) Policy Networks in British Government,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marsh, D. and Rhodes, R. (1992b), Implementing Thatcherite Policies: Audit of anEra, Buckingham: Open Univeristy Press.

Marsh, D., Richards, D. and Smith, M. J. (2001) ‘Unequal Plurality: Towards anAsymmetic Power Model of the British Polity’, unpublished paper, Universityof Birmingham.

Marsh, D. and Smith M. (2000) ‘Understanding Policy Networks: Towards aDialectical Approach’, Political Studies, 48, 4–21.

Marsh, D., Smith, M. J. and Richards, D. (2000) ‘Bureaucrats, Politicians andReform in Whitehall: Analysing the Bureau-Shaping Model’, British Journal ofPolitical Science, 30, 461–82.

Marsh, D. et al. (1999) Postwar British Politics in Perspective, Cambridge: Polity.

Mather, G. (1994) ‘The Market, Accountability and the Civil service’, paperpresented at Public administration conference, University of York, 5–7September 1994.

McAnnula, S. (2001) ‘Structure and Agency’, in D. Marsh and G. Stoker (eds),Theory and Methods in Political Science, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

McCaig, C. (2001) ‘New Labour and Education, Education, Education’, in S. Ludlam and M. J. Smith (eds), New Labour in Government, BBasingstoke:Palgrave.

McFarland, A. (1987) ‘Interest Groups and Theories of Power in America’, BritishJournal of Political Science, 17, 129–47.

McKinlay, A. and Starkey, K. (1998) ‘Managing Foucault: Foucault, Managementand Organization Theory’, in A. McKinlay, and K. Starkey (eds), Foucault,Management and Organization Theory, London: Sage.

McLean, I. Clifford, C. and McMillan, A. (2000) ‘The Organisation of CentralGovernment Departments: a History 1964–92’, in R. A. W. Rhodes (ed.),Transforming British Government, Vol. 1, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

McLeay, E. (1998) ‘Policing Policy and Policy Networks in Britain and NewZealand’ in D. Marsh (ed.), Comparing Policy Networks, Milton Keynes: OpenUniversity Press.

Menon, A. and Forder, J. (1998) ‘Conclusion: States, the European Union andMacroeconomic Policy’, in J. Forder, and A. Menon (eds), The European Unionand Macroeconomic Policy, London; Routledge.

Menon, A. and Hayward J. (1996) ‘States, Industrial Policy and the EuropeanUnion’ in H. Kassim, and A. Menon (eds) The European Union and NationalIndustrial Policy, London: Routledge.

Metcalfe, L. (1993) ‘Conviction Politics and Dynamic Conservatism: Mrs Thatcher’s Managerial Revolution’, International Political Science Review,14(4).

Meyerson, D. (1991) ‘“Normal” Ambiguity? A Glimpse of an OccupationalCulture’, in P. Frost, L. Moore, M. Louis, C. Lundberg, and J. Martin (eds),Reframing Organizational Culture, London: Sage.

Middlemas, K. (1979) Politics in Industrial Society, London: André Deutsch.Middlemas, K. (1991), Power, Competition and the State, Vol 3: the End of the Post-

War Era, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

262 Bibliography

Migue, J. and Berlanger, G. (1974) ‘Towards a General Theory of ManagerialDiscretion’, Public Choice 17.

Milner, H. and Keohane, R. (1996) ‘Internationalization and Domestic Politics’,in R. Keohane and H. Milner (eds), Internationalisation and Domestic Politics,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Minogue, K. and Biddiss, M. (eds) (1988) Thatcherism: Personality and Politics,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Moran, M. (1984) The Politics of Banking, Basingstoke: Macmillan – nowPalgrave.

Mountfield, R. (1997) ‘The New Senior Civil Service: Managing the Paradox’,Public Administration, 75, 307–12.

Newton, S. and Porter, D. (1988), Modernisation Frustrated: the Politics ofIndustrial Decline in Britain since 1990, London: Unwin Hyman.

Niskanen, W. (1971) Bureaucracy and Representative Government, New York:Aldine Atherton.

Niskanen, W. (1973) Bureucracy: Servant or Master?, London: Institute ofEconomic Affairs.

Niskanen, W. (1978) ‘Competition among Government Bureaus’, in J. M.Buchanan (ed.), The Economics of Politics, London: Institute for EconomicAffairs.

Noll, R. G. and Fiorina, M. P. (1979) ‘Voters, Bureaucrats and Legislators: aRational Perspective on the Growth of Bureaucracy’, Journal of PublicEconomics, 9, 239–54.

Norton, P. (2000) ‘Barons in a Shrinking Kingdom: Senior Ministers in BritishGovernment’, in R. A. W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming British Government, Vol 2:Changing Roles and Relationships, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Ohmae, K. (1990) The Borderless World, London: Collins.Parsons, W. (1998) ‘Fuzzy in Theory and Getting Fuzzier in Practice: Post-

Modern Reflections on Responsibility in Public Administration andManagement’, in A. Hondeghem (ed.), Ethics and Accountability in a Context ofGovernance and New Public Management: EGPA Year Book, Amsterdam: IOSPress.

Part, A. (1990) The Making of a Modern Mandarin, London: André Deutsch.Perrow, C. (1970) Organizational Analysis, London: Tavistock.Peters, B. G. (1999) Institutional Theory in Political Science, London: Pinter.Peters, T. and Waterman, R. (1982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s

Best Run Companies, New York: Harper and Row.Peterson, J. (1999) ‘Sovereignty and Interdependence’, in I. Holliday, A. Gamble,

and G. Parry (eds), Fundamentals in British Politics, Basingstoke: Macmillan –now Palgrave.

Phillips, Lord (2000) The BSE Inquiry, London: HMSO.Pierson, P. (1994) Dismantling the Welfare State, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Pile, W. (1979) The Department of Education and Science, London: George Allen

and Unwin.Pitt, D. C. and Smith, B. C. (1981) Government Departments, London: Routledge.Plowden, W. (1994) Ministers and Mandarins, London: IPPR.Pollitt, C. (1984) Manipulating the Machine: Changing the Pattern of Government

Departments, London: Allen and Unwin.

Bibliography 263

Pollitt, C. (1990) Managerialism and the Public Services: the Anglo-AmericanExperience, London: Basil Blackwell.

Ponting, C. (1986) Whitehall: Tragedy and Farce, London: Hamish Hamilton.Powell, W. W. and DiMaggio, P. J. (1991) The New Institutionalism in

Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Pryce, S. (1998) Presidentializing the Premiership, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now

Palgrave.Purnell, S. (1995) ‘An Empire Falls Back’, Financial Times, 16 October.Pyper, R. (1991) Political Realities: the Evolving Civil Service, London:

Longman.Radcliffe, J. (1991) The Reorganisation of British Central Government, Aldershot:

Dartmouth.Rhodes, R. A. W. (1981) Control and Power in Central-Local Government Relations,

Farnborough: GowerRhodes, R. A. W. (1988) Beyond Westminster and Whitehall, London: Allen &

Unwin.Rhodes, R. A. W. (1992) ‘Local Government Finance’, in D. Marsh, and R. A. W.

Rhodes (eds) Implementing Thatcherite Policies: Audit Of An Era, Buckingham:Open University Press.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (1995) ‘From Prime Ministerial Power to Core Executive’, in R. A. W. Rhodes and P. Dunleavy (eds), Prime Minister, Cabinet and CoreExecutive, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (2000) ‘The Governance Narrative: Key Findings and Lessonsfrom the ESRC’s Whitehall Programme’, Public Administration, 78, 345–63.

Rhodes, R. A. W. (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance,Reflexivity and Accountabilty, Buckingham: Open University Press,.

Rhodes, R. A. W and Dunleavy, P. (1995) Prime Minister, Cabinet and CoreExecutive, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Richards, D. 1996 ‘Elite Interviewing: Approaches and Pitfalls’ Politics 16(3).Richards, D. (1997) The Civil Service Under the Conservatives 1979–97: Whitehall’s

Politcal Poodles?, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.Richards, D and Smith, M. J. (1997) ‘How Departments Change: Windows of

Opportunity and Critical Junctures in Three Departments’, Public Policy andAdminstration, 12/2.

Richards, D. and Smith, M. J. (1998) ‘The Gatekeepers of the CommonGood–Power and the Public Service Ethos’, in. A Hondeghem (ed.), Ethics andAccountability in a Context of Governance and New Public Management,Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Richards, D. and Smith, M. J. (2000) ‘Power, Knowledge and the Civil Service:the Living Chimera of the Public Service Ethos and the Role of the CivilService’, West European Politics, 23.

Richards, D. and M. J. Smith (2001a) ‘Breaking the Policy Bias: Windows ofOpportunity and the Realignment of Structural Constraints in ThreeGovernment Departments’, in A. Cortell and S. Peterson (eds), TransformingPolitical Institutions: a Comparative Study of the Sources and Consequences ofDomestic Change, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Richards, D. and Smith, M. J. (2001b) ‘New Labour, the State and theConsitution’, in S. Ludlam, and M. J. Smith (eds), New Labour in Government,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

264 Bibliography

Richards, D., Smith, M. J. and Marsh, D. (forthcoming) ‘Conviction Ministersand the Whitehall Paradigm: the Case of Tony Benn’.

Riddell, P. (1998) Parliament under Pressure, London: Victor Gollancz.Ridley, N. (1991) My Style of Government, London: Hutcheson.Riley, P. (1983) ‘A Structurationist Account of Political Culture’, Administrative

Science Quarterly, 28, 414–37.Roll, E. (1966) ‘The Machinery for Economic Planning: 1. The Department of

Economic Affairs’, Public Administration, 44 (1), 1–11.Rose, R. (1987) Ministers and Ministries: a Functional Analysis, Oxford: Clarendon

Press.Rose, R. (1990) ‘Inheritance before Choice in Public Policy’, Journal of Theoretical

Politics, 2 (3), 263–91.Rose, R. (1993) Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy: a Guide to Learning across Time

and Space, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.Rose, R. (2000) ‘When and Why Does a Prime Minister Change?’, in R. Rhode,

(ed.), Transforming British Government, vol. 2: Changing Roles and Relationships,Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Rose, R. and Davies, P. (1994), Inheritance in Public Policy: Change without Choicein Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rosevere, H. (1969) The Treasury: the Evolution of a British Institution, London:Allen Lane.

Salter, B. and Tapper, T. (1981) Education, Politics and the State, London: GrantMcIntyre.

Sampson, A. (1962) Anatomy of Britain, London: Hodder and Stoughton.Saran, R. (1973) Policy Making in Secondary Education, Oxford: Clarendon.Saward, M. (1997) ‘In Search of the Hollow Crown’, in P. Weller, H. Bakvis and

R. A. W. Rhodes (eds), The Hollow Crown: Countervailing Trends in CoreExecutives, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Schein, E. (1989) ‘Organizational Culture: What it is and How to Change it’, inP. Evans, Y. Doz, and A. Laurent (eds), Resource Management in InternationalFirms, Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Scott, R. (1996) Report of the Inquiry into the Export of Defence Equipment and DualUse Goods to Iraq and Related Prosecution, London: HMSO.

Seldon, A. (1994), ‘Consensus: a Debate too Long?’, Parliamentary Affairs, 47 (4),501–14.

Seldon, A. (1997) Major, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Self, P. (1993) Government by the Market? The Politics of Public Choice, London:

Macmillan – now Palgrave.Sharp, E. (1969) The Ministry of Housing and Local Government, London: George

Allen and Unwin.Smircich, L. (1983) ‘Is the Concept of Culture a Paradigm for Understanding

Organizations and Ourselves’, in P. J. Frost (ed.), Organizational Culture,California: Sage.

Smith, B. and Stanyer, J. (1976) Administering Britain, London: Fontana.Smith, M. J. (1991) ‘From Policy Community to Issue Network: Salmonella in

Eggs and the New Politics of Food’, Public Administration, 69: 235–55.Smith, M. J. (1993) Pressure, Power and Policy, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester

Wheatsheaf.

Bibliography 265

Smith, M. J. (1995) ‘Pluralism’, in D. Marsh and G. Stoker (eds), Theories andMethods in Political Science, London: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Smith, M. J. (1998) ‘Reconceptualising the State: Theoretical and EmpiricalChallenges to British Central Government’, Public Administration, 76, 45–72.

Smith, M. J. (1999a) The Core Executive in Britain, London: Macmillan – nowPalgrave.

Smith, M.J. (1999b) ‘The Institutions of Central Government’, in I. Holliday, A.Gamble, and G. Parry (eds), Fundamentals in British Politics, Basingstoke:Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Smith, M. J., Marsh, D. and Richards, D. (1995) ‘Central GovernmentDepartments and the Policy Process’, in R. A. W. Rhodes and P. Dunleavy(eds), Prime Minister, Cabinet and Core Executive, London: Macmillan – nowPalgrave.

Smith, M. J., Marsh, D. and Richards, D. (2000) ‘Departmentalism, the CoreExecutive and Joined-Up Government’, paper presented at the annual confer-ence of the PSA, London School of Economic, 10–13 April.

Smith, M. J., Richards, D., Marsh, D. and Chapman, J. (1998) ‘Bureaucrats,Politicians and the Reform of Whitehall’ (mimeo).

Spence, J. (1992) ‘The Role of Civil Servants in European Lobbying: the BritishCase’, in S. Mazey and J. Richardson (eds), Lobbying in the EuropeanCommunity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stephens, P. (1996) Politics and the Pound: the Conservatives’ Struggle with Sterling,London: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Stones, R. (1990) ‘Government–Finance Relations in Britain 1964–7’, Economyand Society, 19, 32–55.

Stones, R. (1992) ‘Labour and International Finance, 1964–67’, in D. Marsh andR. A. W. Rhodes (eds), Policy Networks in British Government, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Street, J. and Weale, A. (1992) ‘Aids Policy in the UK’, in D. Kirp and R. Bayer(eds), AIDS in the Industrialized Democracies: Passions, Politics, and Policies, NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Tant, T. (1993) British Government: the Triumph of Elitism, Aldershot: Dartmouth.Taylor, A. (2000) ‘Hollowing Out or Filling In? Taskforces and the Management

of Crosscutting Issues in British Government’, British Journal of Politics andInternational Relations, 2, 46–71.

Taylor, P. (1990), Britain and the Cold War: 1945 and Geopolitical Transformation,London: Pinter.

Tebbit, N. (1988) Upwardly Mobile, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Thain, C. and Wright, M. (1995) The Treasury, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Thain, C. and Wright, M. (1996) The Treasury and Whitehall, Oxford: Clarendon.Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins.Theakston, K. (1995) The Civil Service since 1945, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Theakston, K. (1996) ‘Whitehall, Westminster and Industrial Policy’, in

D. Coates (ed.), Industrial Policy in Britain, London: Macmillan – now Palgrave.Theakston, K. (1999) Leadership in Whitehall, London: Macmillan – now Palgrave.The editors (1999) ‘Editorial: Studying British Politics’, British Journal of Politics

and International Relations, 1(1) pp. 1–11.Thomas, G. (1998) Prime Minister and Cabinet Today, Manchester: Manchester

University Press.

266 Bibliography

Thompson, M., Ellis, R. and Wildavsky, A. (1990) Cultural Theory, Oxford:Westview.

Toonan, A. J. (1991) ‘Europe of the Administrations: the Challenge of 1992’,Public Administation Review, 52, 108–15.

Van Maanen, B. and Barley, S. (1984) ‘Occupational Communities: Culture andControl in Organizations’, Research in Organizational Behaviour, 6, 287–365.

Walker, D. (1999) ‘A Thoroughly Modern Mandarin’, Public Finance, 21–27 May.Walsh, K. (1995) Public Services and Market Mechanism, London: Macmillan –

now Palgrave.Watson, M. (2000) ‘The Political Discourse of Globalization’, PhD dissertation,

University of Birmingham.Watt, R. (1998) ‘Towards a Synthesised Network Approach: an Analysis of UK

Nuclear and Renewable (Ware) Energy Programme, 1939–1985’, PhD disserta-tion, University of Birmingham.

Weir, S. and Beetham, D. (1999) Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain,London: Routledge.

Weller, P., Bakvis, H. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (eds.) (1997) The Hollow Crown:Countervailing Trends in Core Executives, London: Macmillan – now Palgrave.

Whitelaw, W. (1989) The Whitelaw Memoirs, London: Aurum Press.Willson, F. M. G. (1955) ‘Ministries and Boards: Some Aspects of Administrative

Development since 1832’, Public Administration, 33, 43–58.Wilson, H. (1976) The Governance of Britain, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Wilson, R. (1999) ‘The Civil Service in the New Millenium’, http://www.cabinet-

office.gov.uk/1999/senior/re_speech.htm.Winninfrith, J. (1962) The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, London:

George Allen and Unwin.Yin, R. K. (1984) Case Study Research, London: Sage.Young, E. (1991) ‘On the Naming of the Rose: Understanding Multiple

Meanings as Elements of Organizational Culture’, in P. Frost, L. Moore, M. Louis, C. Lundberg and J. Martin (eds), Reframing Organizational Culture,London: Sage.

Young, H. (1982), ‘The Department of Civil Liberties’, in The Home Office:Perspectives on Policy and Administration Bicentenary Lectures 1982 London:RIPA.

Young, H. and Sloman, A. (1982) No, Minister, London: BBC.Young, Lord (1990), The Enterprise Years, London: Headline.Zey, M. (1998) Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory: a Critique,

London: Sage.

Bibliography 267

Index

268

ACPO see Association of Chief PoliceOfficers

‘action’ element of culture, 22–3, 24,38, 38

‘actors’ in society, 22–3administrative support, Prime

Minister’s, 103Adonis, A., 45, 55advisers, special, 143–4agency–departmental relations, DSS,

92–3agency development see Next Steps

programmeagency/structure issue, 3–4, 10–11,

242–3culture, 19–20, 100interest group relations, 199–200ministerial roles, 148–53structural change, 43

agenda-setting role of ministers, 133,133–9, 139, 153

‘anticipated actions’ process, 107–8appointment powers, Prime

Minister’s, 54, 105–7Armstrong, William, 39, 108‘arrogant’ features of Home Office,

78–80Artis, M., 224Association of Chief Police Officers

(ACPO), 184–6, 190–1, 197asymmetric power model, 246–50

Bache, I., 224Baker, Ken, 2, 138, 210–11, 223

dangerous dogs issue, 203, 204Home Secretary role, 73–4, 76–7,

108, 140, 160Bakvis, H., 7Bale, T., 16Balogh, T., 39Barker, A., 29

Barley, S., 20Beer, S., 39Bender, B., 214Benefits Agency, 20Benn, Tony, 7, 39, 94, 60–2, 150

agenda-setting aims, 133–4Civil Service relationship, 31–6

Benson, J. K., 24Benyon, J., 197Berger, P., 19Berlanger, G., 45Beveridge Report, 86, 88Bevir, M., 5Biddis, M., 2Blair, Tony, 109Bradshaw, J., 87Breton, A., 45British political tradition, 28–9, 180,

244, 247Brittan, S., 45Buller, J., 86, 212, 220, 241Bulmer, S., 215, 216Bulpitt, J., 51, 110, 153Burch, M., 214, 215, 216bureau-shaping model, 155, 156–64Burns, Terry, 121Burrell, G., 25, 26Butcher, T., 48, 64, 251Butler, Robin, 28

Cabinet, 105–6, 109–10, 141–2, 128‘Cabinet enforcer’, 109Cabinet ministers see ministerial rolesCabinet Office, 109, 213, 215, 216Callaghan, J., 71, 117–18Campbell, C., 41, 43, 44, 45, 52, 68,

147, 155, 164Carrington, Peter, 46–7, 141, 243Carruthers, B. G., 25Castells, M., 249Castle, B., 39, 124

References in italic indicate figures or tables

Cerny, P., 209Chapman, J., 95Chapman, R. A., 1, 29, 30, 121Chester, D. N., 251Citizen’s Charter, 105civil servant–minister relationships

see minister–civil servantrelationships

Civil Service: Taking Forward Continuityand Change, 55

Clarke, Ken, 73, 230Clarke, R., 251Clegg, S., 26, 27, 48Clifford, J., 18Coates, D., 210Cockett, R., 45codes of conduct, 29, 30–1Conservative structural reforms, 2,

52–9, 67managerial, 55–6personnel, 52–4

consultants, Conservatives’ use of,178–9

consultationConservatives’ use of, 190–4Labour’s use of, 194–6

Continuity and Change, 55co-ordinating mechanisms, European,

214–17co-ordination within departments,

European, 227–9core executive role, 101–31, 248–9

power dependency model, 168–70,168

Prime Minister, 102–19relations between departments,

124–30segmentation, 237–9Treasury, 119–24

Cram, I., 222‘critical realist’ perspective, 3–4Cronin, J., 64Crossman, R., 39, 124Crowther Hunt, N., 7, 39, 46cultural change, 14–42, 69–100,

232–3, 244–5change within Whitehall, 37–41, 38concept of culture, 16–27, 17, 24DEn, 94–8

DSS, 86–94DTI, 80–6Home Office, 70–80Whitehall, 27–37

cultural theory, 16–18, 17‘culture’ concept, 16–27, 17, 24

dependent or independent variable,15

importance, 14–15

Daintith, T., 1dangerous dogs issue, 204Dale, H. E., 27Davies, P., 70, 116Deakin, N., 1, 120–4, 238Dell, Edmund, 107DEn see Energy, Department ofdepartment–agency relations, DSS,

92–3departmental ministers see ministerial

rolesdepartments

centrality of, 1choice of, 3, 251–3, 252cultures, 36, 69–70, 98–100, 99lack of research on, 1–2Prime Ministerial intervention,

109–10, 110–16relations between, 124–30relations with Europe, 212–18,

218–30, 241Treasury interventions, 116–24see also under names of individual

departments, e.g., Trade andIndustry, Department of

dependency model see powerdependency model

Devine, F., 3DHSS see Health and Social Security,

Department ofdifferentiated polity model, 6–8, 181,

233–42, 244, 246, 250ministerial roles, 147–8power issues, 8–9

DiMaggio, P. J., 19, 23, 42DoE see Environment, Department of

theDolowitz, D., 139Donaldson, L., 16

Index 269

Donoughue, P., 118Douglas, M., 16Dowding, K., 7, 11, 43, 44, 56, 156, 182Drewry, G., 48, 251DSS see Social Security, Department ofDTI see Trade and Industry,

Department of‘dual polity’ model, 110Dunleavy, P., 10, 11, 43, 110, 117,

155, 156, 218, 251Dunsire, A., 251Dyrberg, T. B., 25, 26

Eagle, Angela, 29economic context

effect on policy networks’ roles, 200effect on Prime Minister’s role,

116–17globalisation, 210–11

Education and Employment,Department for, 129

education policy, 248–9‘egalitarian’ way of life, 17, 17‘elitist political tradition’, 28–9, 180,

244Ellis, R., 16Employment Department, 117, 129Energy, Department of, 59–60, 62–3,

242–3cultural change, 94–8, 98–100, 99interest group relations, 186–7,

192–3, 200, 201ministerial agenda-setting, 135–6ministerial minimalist role, 141Prime Ministerial intervention,

112–14Environment, Department of the

(DoE), 193, 225–6EU co-ordination changes, 228–9

ethical position of civil servants, 28,29–30

ethnomethodological approach, 23European Secretariat, 215European Union (EU), 209–31, 233

departments’ relations with, 218–30globalisation of the state, 209–12‘hollowing out’ thesis, 240–2ministers’ role in, 143Whitehall’s relations with, 212–18

Evans, M., 87exchange relations patterns, 239, 248‘executive dominance reassertion’

view, 155, 164–8, 175executive role of ministers, 133,

145–7external constraints, pattern of,

249–50external consultants, Conservatives’

use of, 178–9

Falklands War, 111, 116‘fatalistic’ way of life, 17, 17FCO see Foreign and Commonwealth

OfficeFER see Fundamental Expenditure

ReviewFinancial Management Initiative, 2Flinders, M., 28, 53, 234Florina, M. P., 45Foley, M., 101Forder, J., 231Foreign and Commonwealth Office

(FCO), 20–1EU co-ordination changes, 228inter-departmental relations, 124–5Prime Ministerial intervention, 111relations with Europe, 213, 215,

216, 226Foster, C., 41, 44, 52, 68, 110, 147,

153, 155, 160, 164Foucault, M., 26Fowler, Norman, 87–8, 138–9, 139,

166Franklin, B., 206free trade vs interventionism, 80–4Frost, P. J., 19Fry, G., 2, 39, 40, 43, 44Fulton Report, 39, 46, 48Fundamental Expenditure Review

(FER), 121Furlong, P., 3

Gains, F., 94Gamble, A., 45, 46, 210, 212Garfinkel, H., 19, 23George, S., 241Giddens, A., 19Gilmour, Ian, 40, 46, 110

270 Index

Glennerster, H., 87globalisation issues, 209–12, 230, 240Goffman, E., 22–3‘governance’ vs ‘government’ debate,

6, 234–5‘grand strategy’, lack of, 44–7Grant, W., 184, 218Greer, P., 43, 91grid concept, 16, 17group concept, 16, 17Grugel, J., 212

Haines, J., 20Haldane model, 153Hames, T., 45, 55Hay, C., 10, 45, 46, 64, 169, 211Hayward, J., 231Headey, B., 70, 133, 140, 147Health and Social Security,

Department of (DHSS), 64–5,89–91, 129

Heath, E., 46Heclo, H., 1, 27Held, D., 209, 210Hennessy, P., 2, 39, 43, 48, 101, 102,

145, 251Heseltine, Michael, 145–6, 160hierarchical nature of Home Office, 78‘hierarchical’ way of life, 17, 17Hill, J., 105Hirst, P., 211Hogg, S., 105Hogwood, B., 49, 50, 251Holliday, I., 214‘hollowing out’ thesis, 7–8, 209,

239–42Home Office, 12

cultural change, 70–88, 98–100, 99,245

interest group relations, 184–6,190–1

intra-departmental relations, 125–6media relations, 202, 203–6ministerial agenda-setting, 134–5,

139, 139ministerial minimalist role, 141ministerial policy selectors, 140Prime Ministerial intervention,

111–12, 115

relations with Europe, 223, 241structural change analysis, 59, 65–7

Hood, C., 16, 17, 48, 251Hoogvelt, A., 210Hoopes, S., 152, 192, 200Hoskyns, J., 47Hout, W., 212Howard, Michael, 74–5, 76, 166–7, 230

agenda-setting role, 134–5, 139, 139Benn and Lilley compared, 150interest group relations, 185–6media relations, 205–6

Howell, David, 44–5, 113Hungerford massacre, 204–5Hurd, Douglas, 111, 140, 160, 203,

204–5, 223

Ibbs, R., 27ideas/institutions relationship, 11–12,

153–4, 243–5IMF crisis 118‘individualistic’ way of life, 17, 17Industry, Department of, 60, 80–1, 82

ministerial agenda-setting, 137–8‘institutions’ element of culture,

23–4, 24, 38, 38inter-departmental relations, 124–30,

233interest group relations, 181,

182–201, 233explanation of changes, 199–200policy network approach, 182–97power distribution, 197–9

internationalisation perspective, 211,212

interventionism vs free trade, 80–4interventions by prime ministers,

109–10, 110–16interview methods/interpretation,

3–4, 253, 253isolation of Home Office, 78–80

James, S., 2Jay, P., 45Jenkin, Patrick, 87, 114–15, 116, 141

policy initiator role, 139–40Jenkins, Roy, 71–2, 115

agenda-setting role, 133, 134media relations, 205

Index 271

Jensen, L., 16, 17Jessop, B., 39Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA), 117, 129joined-up government, 128–9, 249Joseph, Keith, 82, 149

agenda-setting role, 134, 137–8,139

JSA see Jobseekers’ AllowanceJudge, D., 36, 102

Kavanagh, D., 2, 45, 46, 101, 108,143, 190, 202, 238, 246

Kellner, P., 7, 39, 46Kemp, Peter, 49–50, 159, 160Kenny, M., 28Keohane, R., 211, 212, 217King, A., 2, 39, 45, 190Kingdom, J., 10knowledge and power, 25–6Kogan, M., 20Klymlicka, W., 210

Labour government, 122, 128–9approach to consultation, 194–6media relations, 206–7

Lawson, Nigel, 106, 107, 145, 149,160

agenda-setting role, 134, 135–6energy policy, 62–3, 96, 97, 242–3interest group relations, 186–7Prime Ministerial interference, 113,

114Lee, J., 108, 112Legg, T., 27legitimacy resource of Prime Minister,

102–3liberty vs order perspectives, 70,

71–7Lilley, Peter, 87, 88–9, 113, 141, 194

agenda-setting role, 134, 137, 139Benn and Howard compared, 150social security reforms, 173–4

Ling, T., 49Louis, M. R., 21, 25Lowndes, V., 19‘loyalty’ aspect of Whitehall culture,

33–6, 176Luckman, T., 19Ludlam, S., 46, 139

Madgwick, P., 2, 251MAFF (Ministry for Agriculture,

Fisheries and Food), 214, 217–18Major, John, 55, 56, 105, 118–19managerial reforms, 55–9managerial role of civil servants, 156,

157–9, 161–3managerial role of ministers, 133,

145–7‘managerialism’ culture, 38, 48–9

DSS, 90–1DTI, 84–6Home Office, 78–9

Mandelson, Peter, 142March, J., 19Marsh, M. J., 3, 8, 9, 28, 102, 169,

182, 201, 246D. Richards, M. J. Smith and, 1, 5,

28, 53, 109, 122, 129, 156R. Rhodes and, 7, 127, 139, 182,

235McAnulla, S., 10, 118McCaig, C., 249McFarland, A., 9McKinlay, A., 26McLean, I., 251McLeay, E., 184, 185, 190, 191, 197media, departments’ relations with,

181, 201–7Menon, A., 231Metcalfe, L., 58–9Meyerson, D., 18Migue, J., 45Milner, H., 211, 212, 217Miners’ Strike, 112–13, 116‘minimalist’ role of ministers, 140–1minister–civil servant relationships,

6–7, 8, 36–7, 53–5, 155–80, 233bureau-shaping model, 156–64power dependency model, 168–79,

168reassertion of executive dominance,

164–8Tony Benn, 31–6

ministerial roles, 132–54changing pattern of governance,

147–8changing roles, 132–47, 133, 139European roles, 229–30

272 Index

explaining change, 148–54Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and

Food (MAFF), 214, 217–18Minogue, K., 2mission statement, Home Office, 67Moore, John, 65, 141, 173Mountfield, R., 14

NACRO, Home Office relations with,191

neo-liberal policies, 46, 47globalisation, 210, 211, 240

networks see policy networksNew Deal, 122‘new institutionalism’, 19New Public Management (NPM),

43–4, 48–51and globalisation, 210

New Right ideology, 45–6, 200Next Steps programme, 2, 55–9

civil servants’ role in, 156, 159–61effect on work balances, 158

Niskanen, W., 45Noll, R. G., 45Norton, P., 133Nott, John, 145–6NPM see New Public Managementnuclear energy policy, 94–5

Office of Public Service, 105Ohmae, K., 210Olsen, J., 19order vs liberty perspectives, 70, 71–7organisation/culture relationship,

23–4organisational change, Prime

Minister’s powers, 104–5organisational context of ministerial

roles, 151–2organisational culture, 70, 98–100, 99

DEn, 98DSS, 89–94DTI, 84–6Home Office, 77–80

Page, E., 1Parliament, ministers in, 142Parry, R., 1, 120–4, 238Parsons, W., 48

‘party leader’ basis of Prime Minister’slegitimacy, 103

‘party’ role of ministers, 143–5Payne, A., 212‘performances’ in society, 22–3Permanent Secretaries, work

preferences/balances, 157–8,161–3

personnel reform, 53–5Peters, B. G., 10Peterson, J., 210Phillips, Lord, 30Pitt, D. C., 251Plowden, F., 43, 48

C. Foster and, 41, 44, 52, 68, 147,153, 155, 160, 164

pluralist model of power, 8–9, 181,199, 207, 245–6

policing policy network, 184–6,190–1, 196–7

policy advisers, 143–4Home Office officials as, 77–8, 79

policy chimneys, 125–6, 128–9, 238policy culture, 70, 98–100, 99

DEn, 94–8DSS, 86–9DTI, 80–4Home Office, 70–7

‘policy initiatives’ role of ministers,139–40

‘policy legitimators’ role of ministers,140–1

policy-making preferences of civilservants, 156, 157–9

policy networks, 7, 181, 182–201,235–7

changes over time, 189–96changing role, 199–201policy outcomes, 196–7power distribution, 197–9

policy outcomes, influence of policynetworks, 196–7

policy role of civil servants, 156,161–3, 170–4

policy role of ministers, 133, 133–41,139

‘policy selectors’ role of ministers,140

political advisers, Benn’s use of, 32–3

Index 273

political contexteffect on policy networks’ roles,

200effect on Prime Minister’s role,

116–17globalisation, 211–12

political role of ministers, 133, 141–5Pollitt, C., 2, 251Ponting, C., 48, 124Portillo, Michael, 229–30Powell, W. W., 19, 23, 42power dependency model, 51–2, 68,

155, 168–79, 168core executive, 101–2Home Office, 80

power distribution of policynetworks, 197–9

power issues, 8–9culture and, 18–19, 24–7structural change, 44Whitehall culture, 28–9

powers of Prime Minister, 103–4,104–19

Prices and Consumer Protection,Department of, 60, 62

Prime Minister role, 101, 102–19, 130,237

and departments, 102–4power dependency model, 168–70,

168powers, 104–19

Prime Minister’s Office, 108Prison Service, 160–1‘Prison Works’, 74privatisation policy, DEn, 97–8, 192,

201Pryce, S., 101Public Expenditure Committee, 121public opinion, departments’

relationship with, 181, 201–7public relations advisers, 143–4public relations role of ministers, 133,

145–7public service ethos, 31, 36, 38–41Purnell, S., 219Pyper, R., 48

Radcliffe, J., 14, 60rational choice theory, 163

Rees, Merlyn, 106, 185regionalisation perspective, 211, 230Reorganisation of Central Government,

The, 44, 45research, lack of, 1–2research methods, 3, 251–3, 252, 253researcher status, 4resource use, Prime Minister’s,

117–19, 168–70, 168Rhodes, R. A. W., 5, 6–7, 44, 52, 101,

110, 181, 2091997, 5, 7, 43, 48, 168D. Marsh and, 127, 139, 182, 235

Richards, D., 3, 49, 58, 153, 167–8,238, 246

1997, 2, 14, 39, 46, 48, 54, 147,153, 178

D. Marsh, M. J. Smith and, 1, 5, 28,53, 109, 122, 129, 156

Riley, P., 19, 21, 25Rose, R., 64, 70, 103, 116, 209, 251,

252–3

Sampson, A., 39Saward, M., 53Scott, R., 27, 30sectionalism in DEn, 95segmentation of core executive,

237–9, 248–9Seldon, A., 2, 101, 108, 117, 118, 143,

202Senior Management Review (SMR), 2,

55, 86, 92, 105Sloman, A., 20Smircich, L., 21Smith, B. C., 251Smith, M. J., 7, 9, 23, 29, 86, 198,

217, 2341999a, 2, 44, 49, 52, 53, 101, 102,

168D. Marsh and, 182, 201D. Marsh, D. Richards and, 1, 5, 28,

53, 109, 122, 129, 156D. Richards and, 49, 58, 153,

167–8S. Ludlam and, 46, 139

SMR see Senior Management Reviewsocial conservatism views, Home

Office, 71–2

274 Index

social context, and Prime Minister’srole, 116–17

social liberalism views. Home Office,71–7

Social Security, Department of, 59,64–5

cultural change, 86–94, 98–100, 99,245

inter-departmental relations, 129interest group relations, 189, 193–4,

195Jobseekers’ Allowance dispute, 117media relations, 202–3ministerial agenda-setting, 137,

138–9, 139ministerial policy initiatives, 140power dependency example,

173–4Prime Ministerial intervention,

114–15relations with Europe, 222relations with Treasury, 120–3

social security payments reform,88–9

social welfare principles, 64, 86–7special advisers, 143–4Spence, J., 215Starkey, K., 26Stephens, P., 210Stones, R., 210Strangeways breakout, 203Straw, Jack, 75structural change, 43–69

departmental changes, 59–67lack of ‘grand strategy’, 44–7post-1979, 48–51, 52–9power dependency perspective,

51–2, 177Prime Minister’s powers, 104–5

structural context of ministerial roles,148–9, 151–2

structure/agency issue seeagency/structure issue

structured inequality perspective, 9,247

sub-cultures and sub-systems, 20–1Whitehall, 30, 36–7

‘support’ powers, Prime Minister’s,107–8

Tebbitt, Norman, 82–3, 107, 116, 118Thain, C., 1, 27, 224Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 101–2, 106,

108, 160interventions, 111–15, 118–19, 237view of Civil Service, 40, 47

Thatcherism, 39–40, 45–6Theakston, K., 48theoretical framework development,

4–5Thomas, G., 102Thompson, G., 211Thompson, M., 16timing of research, 2Toonan, A. J., 214top-down budgeting approach, 121Total Managed Expenditure, 121Trade, Department of, 60, 81Trade and Industry, Department of

(DTI), 3, 12cultural change, 80–6, 98–100, 99,

245EU co-ordination changes, 228European role, 143, 230inter-departmental relations, 124–5interest group relations, 187–9,

191–2, 195–6, 200, 201intra-departmental relations, 126–7ministerial agenda-setting, 136,

137–8, 139, 139relations with Europe, 218–22, 241structural change, 59, 60–2

transnationalisation, 210–11Treasury, 1, 17, 20

EU co-ordination changes, 227opposition to Next Steps, 56–7relations with departments, 119–24,

130–1, 238relations with Europe, 224–5

‘trust’ aspect of Whitehall culture,32–33, 163

universality principle, social welfare,88, 89

value element of culture, 21–22, 24,38, 38

Van Maanen, B., 20veto powers, Prime Minister’s, 107–8

Index 275

Waddington, David, 73, 106, 141,160, 203, 223

agenda-setting role, 135, 139Wakeham, John, 97, 115–16Walker, D., 20Walker, Peter, 95–6, 115Watson, M., 211, 240Watt, R., 94‘webs of meaning’, 21–2welfare principles, 64, 86–7welfare to work programme, 122, 238Weller, P., 7, 48Westminster model, 5–6, 164–8, 179,

233, 247Whitehall culture, 27–41, 164–8, 232–3

changes within, 37–41, 38competing frameworks, 36–7, 38relationship with Europe, 212–18Tony Benn, 31–6

Whitelaw, Willie, 112, 115–16, 145–6,203

Wildavsky, A., 1, 16, 27Williams, Shirley, 60Wilson, F. M. G., 251Wilson, G., 29, 41, 43, 44, 45, 52, 68,

147, 155, 164Wilson, R., 14, 38Wintrobe, R., 45Wright, M., 1, 27, 224

Young, David, 83–4, 154, 160agenda-setting role, 134, 136, 138,

139, 139Young, E., 20Young, H., 20

‘zero sum game’, 7, 68, 101, 239Zey, M., 16

276 Index

Changing Patterns of Governance in the United Kingdom: Reinventing Whitehall? (Transforming...

Documents

Transcript of Changing Patterns of Governance in the United Kingdom: Reinventing Whitehall? (Transforming...