DOMMETT Et Al-2015-Public Administration

doi: 10.1111/padm.12121

THE CENTRE STRIKES BACK: META-GOVERNANCE,DELEGATION, AND THE CORE EXECUTIVE IN THEUNITED KINGDOM, 2010–14

KATHARINE DOMMETT AND MATTHEW FLINDERS

A growing literature on ‘agencification’, ‘quangocratization’, and the ‘autonomization’ of the statehas highlighted a coordination dilemma in contemporary public governance whereby governmentsrely on delegated governance but are frustrated by the lack of control that arises from such struc-tures. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election in the United Kingdom this coordination dilemmawas prominent as the capacity of the Cabinet Office to exert control over arm’s-length bodies, eitherdirectly or indirectly, received intense criticism. This article presents the findings of the first detailedresearch project to examine the subsequent Coalition Government’s approach to this dilemma. Itargues that in relation to the governance of public bodies, the role and capacity of the Cabinet Officehas been transformed. In mapping this development the article explores the implications of the cen-tre striking back in the context of ‘post-New Public Management’ reforms.

INTRODUCTION

The structure of the state and the nature of contemporary public governance have longbeen in flux. Shaped by a desire for increased political control and bureaucratic efficiency,governments of all shades have experimented with the architecture of the state (Mackenzieand Grove 1957; Chester and Willson 1968; Self 1977; Jones 1989). In recent decades therise of New Public Management (NPM) has seen what have variously been termed theunravelling, unbundling, and decoupling of the state, with governance moving froma traditional layer cake model to a more complex marble cake configuration in whichthe contours between the public and private sectors are increasingly blurred (Hoogheand Marks 2003, 2004). This shift can be characterized as a ‘hub model’ of governing inwhich a small strategic departmental core exists at the centre (or ‘hub’) of a vast range ofarm’s-length implementation mechanisms.

Whilst often designed to create a leaner, smarter state, such reforms have, paradoxically,resulted in an increasingly complex and fragmented public sector that exists beyond thedirect control of elected politicians. From special operating agencies in Canada to Crownentities in New Zealand, and from independent administrative authorities in France toautonomous public organizations in Thailand, the sphere of delegated governance hasgrown significantly in recent decades (OECD 2002). This has created a dilemma for govern-ments as, despite gaining much in terms of policy implementation and political insulationfrom delegation, ministers experience weakened central control.

This article returns to ongoing debates within British core executive studies on thehollowed-out state (Rhodes 1994; Holliday 2000). Considering the changing position andcapacity of the Cabinet Office within the core executive since 2010, it explores an attemptto reduce fragmentation and increase control over arm’s-length bodies through increasedcoordination and central capacity (Christensen 2012; Diamond 2014). Drawing uponoriginal research in the UK, this article makes three core arguments:

Argument 1: The role and capacity of the Cabinet Office vis-à-vis non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs)has been significantly enhanced since May 2010.

Katharine Dommett and Matthew Flinders are in the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK.

Public Administration Vol. 93, No. 1, 2015 (1–16)© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited.

2 KATHARINE DOMMETT AND MATTHEW FLINDERS

Argument 2: Those problems and challenges that have traditionally been associated with ‘hollowing-out’ havenow been transferred to mainstream departments of state.

Argument 3: The Coalition Government’s reform agenda reveals a failure of meta-governance.

This article presents the findings of the first detailed research project to analyse and trackthe Cabinet Office-led public bodies reform agenda since May 2010, an agenda which ledto 904 bodies being reviewed and 283 closed (National Audit Office 2014a, p. 4). It drawsupon over 150 interviews with politicians, civil servants, and chairs or chief executivesof public bodies (conducted between September 2010 and December 2013). Documentaryanalysis and observation of internal meetings, workshops, and conferences in ministerialdepartments also delivered fresh insights and data.

This article makes a theoretical contribution by locating core executive studies withinthe broader and related sub-fields of multi-level governance and meta-governance. It inte-grates these literatures to explore, in detail, the UK government’s response to the increasedcomplexity arising from NPM reforms. Unlike previous work in this area which has tendedto utilize quantitative analyses to explore the implications of NPM and post-NPM initia-tives (Zafra-Gomes et al. 2012), this article maps how central government capacity has beenenhanced, and traces the consequences of these changes for departments, public bodies,and state governance more generally.

To substantiate these arguments and explore their broader theoretical and comparativerelevance, this article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on conceptualand theoretical foundations by exploring the concept of meta-governance before explain-ing its relationship with the literature on core executive studies. The second and mostsubstantive section then develops this argument by discussing how the Coalition Gov-ernment in the UK has, since May 2010, attempted to solve what Gash and Rutter (2011)labelled the ‘quango conundrum’ within the context of debates about meta-governanceand the capacity of the core executive. The final section then considers the relevance ofthis research from an international and comparative perspective.

META-GOVERNANCE AND CORE EXECUTIVE STUDIES

How do scholars who generally exist very much beyond the state seek to understand theshifting pressures and structures within the state? The answer is that they utilize theories,concepts, and techniques – tools of political analysis – to examine how the modern stateactually operates intus, et in cute (i.e. underneath, and in the flesh). These tools includerational choice theoretic approaches, a variety of institutionalisms, sophisticated quanti-tative techniques, interpretive approaches, and many other theories and methods. Theselected tools deployed here are the theory of ‘meta-governance’ and the concept of thecore executive. This section offers a brief account of each approach, illustrates their com-plementarity, and reflects upon their analytical leverage for a study of the Coalition Gov-ernment’s public bodies reform programme.

If the hub-model of governance (discussed above) is accepted as the dominant emerg-ing model of the state (Verhoest et al. 2012), then how politicians govern at a distancebecomes a – if not the – central question of contemporary statecraft. This question leadsto the concept of meta-governance and its focus on the governance of governance or – toadopt Lash’s (2002) terms – the transition from the logic of structures to the logic of flows.Scholars of meta-governance are concerned with the changing role, capacity, and reachof the state in an era of proliferating networks and increasingly decentred structures.Meta-governance ‘points to the mechanisms that public authority and other resourceful

Public Administration Vol. 93, No. 1, 2015 (1–16)© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

THE CENTRE STRIKES BACK 3

actors can use to initiate and stimulate negotiated self-governance among relevant stake-holders and/or to guide them in a certain direction’ (Sørensen et al. 2011, p. 379). Therefore‘learning to meta-govern’, Davies (2013, p. 5) argues, ‘would allow political leaders andstate managers to harness and derive maximum potential from a world of networks’. Thisemphasis on ‘flows’ or the challenges of governing in ‘a messy and floating world’ raisesquestions about the relationship between hierarchies, networks, and markets (Sørensenet al. 2011, p. 375).

A demarcation can be drawn between the interactive or pluricentric governanceschool and its emphasis on meta-governance as ‘the governance of governance’ and thestate-centric or relational school with its emphasis on ‘the government of governance’.The former school is associated with scholars including Torfing, Kooiman, and Sørensenand uses meta-governance to explore how interdependent and semi-autonomous actorscan be influenced by state authorities using non-traditional steering mechanisms. Thelatter school, by contrast, emphasizes the residual and continued role of the state withinincreasingly complex networks. For scholars such as Macleod and Goodwin (1999, p. 716),meta-governance is part of an attempt to ‘forge and sustain a “successful” political projectand scalar fix’. Marsh (2011, p. 44) conceives of meta-governance as ‘collibration’ – theselective or strategic adjustment of the mix of hierarchies, markets, and networks bymeta-governors. ‘Meta-governance therefore not only indicates a continued role for thestate in the regulation of self-regulating networks’, Fawcett argues, ‘but it also casts doubton the view that the vertical hierarchies of the old social structures of the state have beenreplaced or subsumed by such networks’ (Fawcett 2009, p. 37).

What both schools of meta-governance share is a focus on structuring the rules of thegame and then seeking to enforce those rules through control mechanisms. For the inter-active school, attempts to meta-govern through traditional top-down processes need to bereplaced with an emphasis on softer tools of governance, whereas relational or state-centrictheorists, such as Bell and Hindmoor, emphasize the continued role of hierarchical author-ity over semi-state and non-state actors (Bell and Hindmoor 2009).

Such rich intellectual scaffolding demands to be empirically tested through detailedaccounts of ‘meta-governors’ in action. And yet few studies exist that examine specificstrategies of collibration (defined by Dunsire (1993, p. 12) as ‘the managing of an existingsocial tension’) in the context of debates about the hollowing-out of the state. Evenfewer have mapped how new governments have sought to redefine the relationshipsbetween hierarchies, markets, and networks on taking power. It is for these reasons thatthe public bodies reform agenda in the UK since May 2010 provides such empirical andtheoretical potential. To realize this potential it is necessary to adopt a complementaryand more focused analytical toolkit, with the capacity to engage with the issues thatmeta-governance highlights, but with a tighter and more focused lens. The buckle inthis article between the macro and the micro is usefully furnished in Bevir and Rhodes’(2006, p. 74) concern about ‘a hollowed-out state, a core executive fumbling to pull rubberlevers of control, and a massive proliferation of networks’ and the connection this workprovides to a seam of scholarship on core executive studies.

Reduced down to its simplest form the field of core executive studies focuses attentionon ‘the centre of central government’ and ‘all those organizations and structures thatprimarily serve to pull together and integrate central government policies, or act as finalarbiters within the executive of conflicts between different elements of the governmentmachine’ (Dunleavy and Rhodes 1990, p. 4). It seeks to examine, at a more detailed andfine-grained level, exactly how ministers and their officials seek to manage the competing



and complex pressures illuminated by meta-governance theory. This seam of scholarshipoffers a range of insights which make it particularly appropriate for this article’s focus onthe management and control of public bodies. First, core executive studies bring with it acertain institutional breadth in the sense that it directs attention to the interplay betweenstate and semi-state actors (between hub and spokes). Second, it delivers a degree ofanalytical depth because of its rejection of over-simplistic zero-sum conceptualizationsof power and the cultivation of a more sophisticated approach to inter-organizationalrelationships that acknowledges the existence of complex resource-dependencies. Actorstherefore possess different resources (money, personnel, legislative authority, electorallegitimacy, expertise) and power is contingent and relational.

Awareness of resource-dependency implicitly rejects overly-simplistic principal–agentaccounts and in its place offers a more complex account of bargaining and game-playing.Ministers, departments, local government actors, regulators, quango-chiefs, and all theactors within the delivery landscape are seen to engage in a form of modern ‘court pol-itics’ in which competing claims and justifications are made, drawing upon establishednarratives, traditions, or institutional logics, to facilitate or block reform of one kind oranother (Rhodes 2007, p. 1248; Rhodes 2013).

If a focus on narratives and traditions brings us to what James (2009) labels the thirdwave of core executive studies by emphasizing an interpretive ontology and broadlyanthropological methodology, then it also reminds us that the first wave of writingfocused on the ‘hollowing-out’ of the state and the second wave on the ‘filling-in’ ofthe state. Taken together these three stages have provided a sophisticated account of theday-to-day business of government and of the changing role of ministers. And yet thefield is open to criticism. At the micro-political level there are very few studies that seekto map the changing topography of the core executive (in terms of resources and controlsover arm’s-length bodies) over time. At the mid-range, studies have generally focusedon either external pressures on the core executive (notably forms of Europeanization)or internal relationships within the Cabinet (i.e. the relationships between ministers,senior civil servants, and special advisers, or between spending and coordinating depart-ments) – the two ‘broad avenues of research’ identified by Elgie’s (2011, p. 68) synthesisof the field.

But no studies have attempted to examine how the core executive seeks to structureand control the relationships that delivery departments have with the arm’s-lengthbodies they sponsor. This is a critical point that takes us back to the notion of managingat a distance and the theory of meta-governance. As the bulk of public spending andpublic employment at the national level resides in arm’s-length bodies, then the capac-ity of the core executive to steer and control not just ministerial departments but alsonon-departmental bodies becomes central to the business of government (OECD 2002;Verhoest et al. 2012).

In the UK many departments can now be characterized as hubs in which the vast major-ity of departmental budgets are channelled to and spent by arm’s-length bodies. In someinstances the size of the core department is dwarfed by the size of specific public bod-ies. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs employs 2,457 staff (as ofMarch 2013), whereas the Environment Agency (an NDPB sponsored by the department)employs nearly 12,000 staff. Similarly, the new arm’s-length body charged with improvinghealthcare – NHS England – has a budget in excess of £90 billion (around three-quartersof the Department for Health’s total annual spend). Given this complex bureaucratic land-scape, the absence of literature explicitly seeking to theorize core executive reform as an



TABLE 1 Pathologies of delegated governance: evidence up to May 2010

Dimension Pathology Exemplar references

1 Insufficient clarity on the respective roles andresponsibilities of arm’s-length bodies andtheir sponsor departments

National Audit Office. 2004. ‘The CorporateGovernance of Sponsored Bodies’;

National Audit Office. 2010.‘Non-Departmental Public BodiesPerformance Reporting to Departments’

2 Insufficient mechanisms for maintainingproductive institutional relationshipsbetween arm’s-length bodies and theirsponsor departments

HC 537. 2011. ‘Smaller Government: Shrinkingthe Quango State’

3 Insufficient focus on developing the skills ofthose involved in operating arm’s-lengthgovernment

Institute for Government. 2010. ‘Read BeforeBurning’

4 Insufficient capacity within the Cabinet Officeto support sponsor departments (or evenmaintain basic databases of whatarm’s-length bodies even exist)

House of Lords Select Committee on theConstitution. 2004. ‘The Regulatory State:Ensuring its Accountability’;

Veredus. 2006. ‘Veredus, Right from the Start:Lessons Learned from the Start-Up ofNon-Departmental Public Bodies’

5 Insufficient focus on sponsorship bydepartments with official reports finding alarge number of public bodies to haveassumed ‘orphan status’

Cabinet Office. 2002. ‘Alexander Report’;HM Treasury. 2010. ‘Reforming Arm’s-Length

Bodies’

element of a larger meta-governance project is surprising. The simple argument beingmade is that meta-governance and core executive studies have largely existed as ‘islandsof theorizing’ – to adopt Hooghe and Marks’ (2003) phrase – but can be highly insightfulwhen examined in combination.

The question then becomes one of understanding the changing relationship betweencore and periphery within an increasingly fluid socio-political context. The benefit ofexamining this question in the British case is that it provides a rather extreme case ofgovernance failure. Even a cursory analysis of British administrative history reveals thecontrol and management of arm’s-length bodies to have never been a priority for ministersor officials. The twentieth century ended with the House of Commons describing NewLabour’s approach to the governance of ‘quangos’ as ‘unambitious, piecemeal, and adhoc’, and Peter Hennessy telling the House of Lords that ‘we [the UK] are deeply ingrainedas a back-of-the-envelope nation, certainly in the organization of the central state’ (HC209 1999, para 59). Since the millennium a host of parliamentary reports (HC 537 2011),official inquires (Cabinet Office 2002), think tank reports (Institute for Government 2010),external management consultants (Veredus 2006), scholarly studies (Flinders 2009), andNational Audit Office (2004, 2010) reports have all (in their own ways) highlighted fivecentral issues (see table 1).

These issues combine to focus attention back on the notion of meta-governance and thecapacity of the core executive to control and coordinate that vast sphere of delegated gov-ernance. The simple argument arising from all the reports and reviews – irrespective of thesource – was that the core executive had lost control. The challenge for the next govern-ment in the run-up to the 2010 General Election was therefore to recalibrate the relation-ship between the core executive, mainstream delivery departments, and their arm’s-length



bodies. The manifestos of all three main political parties therefore included a commitmentto reform ‘the quango state’. With the benefit of hindsight one of the most instructiveinterventions came in July 2009 with David Cameron’s speech ‘People Power: ReformingQuangos’ which balanced an emphasis on abolition with a commitment to reform.

It would be far too simplistic for me to stand here and announce some kind of ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’.People have heard that kind of talk many times before, and seen little to show for it. Instead, we need a moresophisticated approach… [P]roper public spending control means proper control of quango spending and propercontrol of quango spending has to start at the top. (Cameron 2009, emphasis added)

The research presented in this article reveals that this ‘more sophisticated approach’involved the selective and strategic alteration of a number of tools of governance. Thishas led to a stark shift in the relationship not just between public bodies and their parentdepartments but also in the role and capacity of the Cabinet Office which has beensubstantially strengthened since 2010, echoing previous attempts by Tony Blair andHarold Wilson. This shift supports the findings of post-NPM theorists (see Christensenand Lægreid 2007; Olsen 2008; Christensen 2012) who diagnose an increase in centralgovernment capacity and departmental coordination as a response to the complexitycaused by NPM reforms. By exploring the dynamics of change in the UK, this article notonly entwines two often separate literatures but also advances understanding of howattempts to re-centralize and boost politicians’ capacity to exert control over delegatedagencies have been advanced, and what implications these have had.

COALITION GOVERNMENT AND REFORM

The Coalition Government’s intention to address the governance failures outlined abovewas signalled within days of their taking office when the Minister for the Cabinet Office,Francis Maude, announced a fundamental review of public bodies. The lack of any reli-able central list or register of arm’s-length bodies – irrespective of their specific organi-zational form – made this a major undertaking. Although excluding some organizationalcategories (notably health bodies), the 2010 review provided the most comprehensive anal-ysis of public bodies in the UK for several decades (Flinders and Skelcher 2011). It iden-tified 679 NDPBs and 222 other statutory bodies (i.e. non-ministerial departments andpublic corporations) and recommended far-reaching reform. Whereas the Pliatzky Reviewof 1980 recommended a 12 per cent reduction in the number of NDPBs, the Maude Reviewtargeted over a third of all bodies for abolition or amalgamation – more specifically 159advisory NDPBs, 78 executive NDPBs, 6 tribunal bodies, and 19 other bodies (HC 505 2010;Dommett and Flinders 2014). The fate of a further 40 bodies remained under consideration(Cabinet Office 2011).

A Public Bodies Bill was brought forward as the main vehicle for implementing thesemeasures and, although the government was forced to make a number of concessions, thePublic Bodies Act 2011 received Royal Assent on 14 December 2011. Twelve months later,Public Bodies 2012 (re-published after a three-year gap) reported that more than 130 bodieshad been abolished and more than 150 merged into fewer than 70 (an overall reduction ofaround 220).

In pursuing this agenda the Cabinet Office vastly expanded its influence overarm’s-length governance. Five inter-related areas of increased control (see table 2) thatcharacterize the Coalition Government’s attempt to ‘meta-govern’ and alter governancerelationships can be identified.



TABLE 2 The public bodies reform agenda: core executive collibration

Dimension Meaning Evidence post-2010

D1. Capacity The ability to set out and enforce ameta-governance framework

Increases in staff within the Cabinet Office(notably within the Public Bodies Team)

D2. Control The power to dictate levels of discretion andautonomy across a number of issuesa

A new Controls Framework that shifts thebalance of power back towards sponsordepartments and the core executive

D3. Context The ability to stipulate the environment inwhich actors take decisions

New requirements which emphasizetransparency and underline the role ofthe Cabinet Office

D4. Connectivity The existence of an emphasis on themanagement of department–ALBrelationships

Reforms to sponsorship arrangements

D5. Continuity The existence of a rolling-evaluation systemto entrench specific reform principles

A new system of triennial reviews, whichsubject all NDPBs to episodic review

aLevel 1 – Departmental authority and sign-off required; Level 2 – Cabinet Office authority and sign-off required.Exemptions will be considered but must be considered on a case-by-case basis by the Cabinet Office and HMTreasury.

In terms of the first dimension (D1, table 2), the capacity of the Cabinet Office wasimmediately strengthened in two ways after May 2010. First, the size of the Public BodiesTeam was increased from the 1.5 (full-time equivalent) staff it had enjoyed between2006 and 2010 to 17 staff by the end of 2010. Furthermore, the Public Bodies Team wasbolstered by the creation of associated units such as the Commercial Models Team andthe Shared Services Team that sit within the Transformation Cluster in the CabinetOffice’s newly constituted Efficiency and Reform Group (nearly 900 staff) (NationalAudit Office 2013). Second, capacity was strengthened in the form of a Minister of Statewho not only sat in the Cabinet but was also clearly and personally committed to thepublic bodies reform agenda. The post of Minister for the Cabinet Office is generallynot viewed as a senior government position (indeed, it is often associated with politedemotion), and ministerial tenure is therefore generally brief (from May 1997 to May2010, 12 individuals held this position with an average tenure of 11 months). Having along-serving Minister of State who had a very clear grasp of the issues (and had evenbeen the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister since 2 July 2007) was highlighted as essentialto the success and pace of the subsequent reforms. As a senior Cabinet Office officialnoted:

The impact of sustained ministerial focus cannot be overstated. Even though the Public Bodies Reform hasofficially transferred to Nick Hurd [Minister for Civil Society in the Cabinet Office], Francis [Maude] stillkeeps a very close interest in the topic and will intervene if necessary. The stability matters for many reasons.Whereas the ministers in other departments may have changed, Francis is able to ‘lock-in’ the new ministerdue to his knowledge of all the previous negotiations and agreements… it’s about political and institutionalmemory. Within the Cabinet Office his knowledge of what all the various policy teams are up to reducesfragmentation. (Interview, December 2013)

Such capacities gave the Cabinet Office unprecedented ability to monitor and controlthe public bodies landscape as manifest in the range of new initiatives outlined below.

At the heart of this reform agenda was a focus not on abolition but on increasingcontrol (D2, table 2) in the sense of increasing the capacity of the core executive todictate levels of discretion and autonomy. This was delivered through the immediate



TABLE 3 Reforms in the control framework

Area Scope Control

Advertising,marketing andcommunications

Advertising and marketing, includingdigital activity; consultation activities;communication strategy; marketresearch, events and public relationsactivities

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – advertising, marketing or

communications of £100 k or above

Strategic suppliermanagement

Expenditure and dealings with anystrategic supplier. In particular, anynew expenditure, contract negotiationor extension

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – £5 m for new expenditure; any

contract extension or material changesto services valued at over £5 m

Commercial models All disposals of business; outsourcingcontracts, the creation of any neworganization regardless of itsorganizational form or notional value

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – £5 m for outsourcing decisions,

otherwise no lower limit

ICT All ICT expenditure (contracts, licences,pilots, etc.); common infrastructuresolutions

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – ICT expenditure over £5 m (full

lifetime costs); £1 m on back officereforms; £100 K on commoninfrastructure solutions

Digital default All departmental expenditure on digitalservices and activity

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – all digital services (no lower

limit)External

recruitmentAny new permanent recruitment; any

new direct temporary recruitment;indirect temporary (agency) staff;inward secondments or loans,extensions to existing recruitment

Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – departments are required to

submit quarterly recruitment forecasts

Consultancy Any central governmental consultancyexpenditure over £20 k

Level 1 – all consultancy above £20 k.Level 2 – all consultancy above £20 k

where contracts are expected toexceed nine months or contracts areexpected to be extended beyond ninemonths

Redundancy andcompensation

All redundancy schemes Level 1 – as set by departments.Level 2 – all schemes must be approved

by the Cabinet OfficeProperty New leases or renewals; new property

acquisitions; all facilities managementcontracts

Level 1 – Rental expenditure under£100 k during the life of the lease.

Level 2 – Rental expenditure above£100 k during the life of the lease.Approval must be sought for allfacilities management contractsregardless of value

Source: Cabinet Office (April 2013). Cabinet Office Controls Guidance (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cabinet-office-controls-guidance-version-3-1), accessed 16 April 2014.

implementation (from September 2010, without any prior consultation) of a new internalcontrols framework for all the NDPBs that were to continue in existence after the initialreview. As table 3 illustrates, this covered nine main areas of activity and was designed tointroduce ‘tough spending controls to tackle unnecessary and poorly coordinated publicspending’ (Cabinet Office 2012).



The new controls framework is critical to the general ‘centre strikes back’ narrativeoffered by this article for at least three reasons. First and foremost, it reflects the increasedbasic capacity of the Cabinet Office to administer and oversee a multidimensionalcross-governmental controls system, when prior to the 2010 General Election it couldnot even maintain a basic list of what arm’s-length bodies existed. Second, it reflectsan attempt by the Cabinet Office (as well as the Treasury) to impose a one-size-fits-allapproach onto a highly diverse NDPB landscape where bodies differ in size, role, remit,and governance. Third, although the new controls framework was originally announcedin 2010 as a temporary measure, it has now been made permanent. ‘Tight–tight’, as onesenior civil servant in the Cabinet Office put it, ‘is the new permanent’. The impact ofthis increased central capacity has not been universally welcomed. One NDPB Chairdescribed the implementation of the new controls systems as ‘micro-management byremote control… It’s ridiculous’ (Interview, October 2012). Another senior official, speak-ing at a public event, even described the imposition of the new controls framework as‘the tourniquet model of governance’ (May 2012) (a point returned to below).

If D2 emphasizes direct control and oversight, then D3 (i.e. Context) emphasizes theCoalition Government’s attempts to apply indirect control pressures through an empha-sis on transparency (i.e. external control pressures). Details of how much officials are paid,every line of government spending above £25 k, every contract worth over £10 k (and theactual contract in full), plus other measures, are all monitored by a new Public Sector Trans-parency Board. At a broader level the introduction of Whole of Government Accounts, aconsolidated set of financial statements for around 1500 organizations across the publicsector, will provide new levels of transparency, delivering similar accounts by which toassess government organizations (HM Treasury 2010). Additionally, as part of the ClearLine of Sight (Alignment) project, the expenditure of NDPBs is now incorporated into theEstimates and Resource Accounts of sponsoring departments which, in turn, ensures thatPermanent Secretaries (as Accounting Officers) pay more attention to the governance ofpublic bodies (House of Commons Library 2010).

One element of this tighter relationship (between both the Cabinet Office and depart-ments, and departments and public bodies) has been a sustained focus on connectivity(D4, table 2). This emphasis has directed attention to sponsorship, the process by whichdepartments manage and monitor public bodies to deliver an effective balance betweenautonomy and control.

Until 2010 a focus on how public bodies were, let alone how they should be, sponsoredhad effectively formed a governance vacuum at the heart of British government. Thisissue had been raised several times by the Public Administration Select Committee dur-ing 1997–2010, who argued that ‘The Cabinet Office should revise its guidance on publicbodies as quickly as possible, placing more emphasis on the proper, on-going relationshipbetween departments and the organizations they sponsor’ (HC 537 2011, paras 71–72).One of the most innovative features of the public bodies reform agenda has involved notonly a focus on taking sponsorship skills and support seriously (see table 4) but also amore subtle attempt to reposition the importance of sponsorship within the culture of thesenior civil service. ‘The aim has been to not only improve the support and training givento those charged with managing relationships’, a senior civil servant acknowledged, ‘butmore importantly to try and get these sorts of skills and experience recognized as crucialto the effective business of government’ (Interview, November 2013).



TABLE 4 Sponsorship improvement plan (October 2013)

1. Cross-Whitehall Sponsorship Network established (meeting monthly and led by the Ministry ofJustice) to share examples of best practice and discuss principles of good sponsorship

2. Sponsorship Competency Framework developed for all civil servants working in a sponsorship role3. Sponsorship now recognized as a formal professional specialism within the Civil Service4. Cross-Government Sponsorship Champion appointed to raise awareness of the specialism, build

partnerships between departments and public bodies, and promote learning and development5. Training units now hosted on the Civil Service Learning e-platform6. Sponsors Induction Pack developed and all central guidance documentation revised and reissued7. Document sharing depository and message board established [www.collaborate.gsi.gov.uk]

The final dimension (D5, Continuity) focuses on the legacy of the public bodiesreform agenda and particularly on how reform based around (1) abolishing unneces-sary bodies, (2) retaining control, and (3) developing new forms of ‘alternative servicedelivery mechanisms’ could be sustained. The Coalition’s answer was to introduce anew cross-governmental system of triennial reviews, once again overseen by the Cab-inet Office. ‘These triennial reviews will’, the Minister for the Cabinet Office told theHouse of Commons, ‘ensure that never again will the quango state be allowed to spiralout of control’ (HC 108 2011). In a process that is very close to the previous system ofquinquennial reviews – which were discontinued in 2003 – departments are requiredregularly to consider ‘whether a function is required and, if it is, whether it should existat arm’s-length from Government’ in order to advance further reform (Maude 2011).

In the first year of the new triennial review process (2011–12) a large number of rela-tively small and less politically salient NDPBs were selected for review, with larger andmore sensitive bodies such as the Environment Agency, Youth Justice Board, and ResearchCouncils reviewed in years 2 and 3. Whilst 298 NDPBs have been exempt from the triennialreview process until 2014–16 – because of recent reforms or changes affected by wider gov-ernment agendas (National Audit Office 2014b, p. 17) – triennial reviews have prompteddepartments to pay closer attention to their public bodies and maintain an emphasis onreform. Although the vast majority have recommended the status quo rather than reformor abolition, some changes have taken place. The Office for Disability Issues (known asEquality 2025) was recommended for abolition, and the Criminal Injuries CompensationAuthority changed in organizational status from NDPB to executive agency to more accu-rately reflect its working status. More widely triennials have made a range of recommen-dations designed to improve the governance arrangements of public bodies. Accordingly,whilst triennials have been subject to a range of criticisms over capacity, proportionality,and oversight (Dommett 2014; National Audit Office 2014b), they have provided a regularmechanism for review with the capacity to deliver future reform.

What this brief focus on triennial reviews, and indeed this whole section, has highlightedis a distinct shift in the governance of public bodies since May 2010. The centre has struckback. In Whitehall this shift is frequently spoken of in the language of a transition froma ‘loose–loose’ relationship with arm’s-length bodies (i.e. a ‘poor parenting’ model) to a‘tight–tight’ relationship. The tightness of the new controls framework takes us back to thedescription by a senior official of this new relationship between Whitehall and its NDPBsas the application of ‘the tourniquet model of governance’ (May 2012). The fact that theofficial went on to warn of the risks of micromanagement and to recognize that ‘we allknow what happens if a tourniquet is too tight or is left on for too long – the arm drops off!’,



provides a rather dramatic metaphor with which to reflect upon the broader implicationsof these changes and the relevance of this research.

LEARNING TO META-GOVERN?

In many ways the quango conundrum provides an almost perfect example of Downs’(1972) ‘issue attention cycle’ – governments around the world are elected on the basis ofcommitments to reduce ‘the quango state’ but once in office are generally far less interestedin implementing reform (Flinders et al. 1999). Recent research in the UK, however, suggeststhat across several dimensions the Coalition Government has introduced ‘a more sophis-ticated’ (cf. Cameron) and significant reform agenda than might have been expected fromprevious historical experiences (see Flinders et al. 2014). Reforms have been implementedto address all of the pathologies identified in table 1 and although the long-term successor implications of these measures are yet to be seen, they signal an attempt to bolster thecapacity and role of the Cabinet Office. In line with Argument 1 (above), after severaldecades of apparent decline and a failure to solve the governance dilemma posed by NPMreforms, it would appear that the centre has ‘struck back’ (at least as far as the oversightof NDPBs is concerned).

The aim of this section, however, is to drill-down further into this conclusion by employ-ing the theory of meta-governance and the field of core executive studies to expose thebroader empirical and comparative implications of this central conclusion. Further, itexamines the implications of this re-centralization and its relevance to the post-NPMparadigm, arguing that concerns over central strategic capacity have not so much beensolved, as shifted along the chain of delegation from the core executive to mainstreamdepartments. This, as the work of MacCarthaigh (2011) suggests, has significant inter-national and comparative relevance. Indeed, Frederickson (2005, p. 290) concluded hisreview of the international literature on public sector reform by suggesting that despitethe pervasive influence of network discourses, the underlying narrative of contemporarygovernance theory and practice is the search for order. In the case of the governance ofpublic bodies in the UK since May 2010, the Coalition Government has consistentlyemphasized a narrative of control but not necessarily order. In terms of teasing out thetheoretical and empirical relevance of this argument, the issue of control leads us back tothe field of core executive studies and the issue of order to the theory of meta-governance.

What is clear from the research presented in this article is that the capacity of the Cab-inet Office vis-à-vis public bodies has been significantly strengthened, even transformed,by a Coalition Government which recognized the perils of a ‘hollow crown’ (Weller et al.1997). Increased staffing, ministerial stability and commitment, and the introduction ofrobust control frameworks have enhanced both the reach and depth of the Cabinet Office,all of which have been highly significant in effecting change. These developments havealso, however, led to a new set of governing dilemmas, particularly derived from the con-trast between a Cabinet Office with increasing resource and demands, and a departmentalcontext of budget reductions and staff cuts.

In the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, for example, budget reductionsduring 2010–12 led to the loss of over 300 core departmental staff and the need to reducecore administrative costs and programme spend by £1,164 million (National Audit Office2011, p. 5; National Audit Office 2012, p. 5). In many areas, as the Institute for Govern-ment’s ‘It Takes Two’ report of March 2012 makes clear, the staffing of departmental spon-sorship teams has borne the brunt of these cutbacks. Such problems were compounded



by an increase in staff mobility as a result of internal reforms, a point raised by NDPBchairs, one of whom complained that in the 12 months after May 2012 he had met five dif-ferent ‘senior sponsors’ in his parent department, and in 2013 the Public AdministrationCommittee highlighted reducing internal staff mobility as a key challenge for the futureof the civil service (HC 664 2013, paras 87–93). Departmental staff therefore complainedthat the capacity of the Cabinet Office to play a more strategic and proactive role in thegovernance of public bodies had increased at exactly the time that departmental capaci-ties to manage their family of arm’s-length bodies was waning because of the impact ofexpenditure reductions. The following quote is representative of a broader frustration.

You do get a sense at the moment that you have quite a lot of resource in the centre, in both Cabinet Officeand Treasury… [and] that more and more is done about arm’s-length body control, but [they are] unableto interface with any individual arm’s-length body themselves, and unable to interface with any individualsponsor teams… from where we sit, there seems to be a level of people across Government roaming around ina very inefficient manner trying to impose [an] efficiency agenda, rather than having a single point of contactfor arm’s-length bodies which just says, ‘Over the next three years, do X with Y amount of money or we’llshut you if you don’t’. (Interview, December 2013)

Triennial reviews, in particular, were a specific point of concern as departments gener-ally lacked resources with which to support and oversee reviews . As one civil servant com-mented, ‘we all do it in our spare time and it’s voluntary alongside everything else, which,with hindsight, is a ridiculously stupid way of doing it if you wish to achieve real, seri-ous reform’ (Interview, April 2013a). In many departments civil servants are struggling toidentify the financial and/or staffing resource necessary to conduct reviews, leading themeither to enact superficial ‘tick box’ reviews (Interview, April 2013b) designed to satisfyCabinet Office requirements, or to delay reviews (indefinitely). Even departments whichhave devoted extensive financial and staffing resource, such as Defra’s review of NaturalEngland/Environment Agency, have commented that ‘it hasn’t felt over-resourced, youknow. If anything it’s been quite a struggle to cover the ground with the resources’ (Inter-view, April 2013c). These different experiences may reflect alternative degrees of politicalimpetus and prioritization within departments, but for the majority of interviewees a lackof resources was the primary challenge.

Just seeing the sheer level of people they [other departments] put into these things. It must be lovely, havingchallenge groups with lawyers, senior people on them, I can’t imagine ever getting a group like that to cometogether. I’d love to be able to, and obviously that’s what I’ll try and do for our next ones, but having thatkind of dedicated resource, they’re lucky they can do that. (Interview, April 2013d)

Instead of identifying processes of either filling-in or hollowing-out – a binary focus thattends to dominate the existing literature – a distinctive element of this research in theUK is its identification of a simultaneous process of filling-in (the Cabinet Office) andhollowing-out (departments). The problem of the hollow crown has therefore been notso much solved as passed-on down the chain of delegation. This process of administrativetransference has been complicated by concerns about the proportionality of new processes;in particular by the new controls framework (table 3) as the data and information requestsit entailed were viewed as detrimental to bodies’ ability to focus on their core tasks. Manyof the Cabinet Office’s data requests were reported by officials to be ‘frankly completelynonsensical’ (Interview, February 2013), a problem compounded by the perception of dis-unity conveyed in the comment that ‘there are, you know, 15 different bits [of the CabinetOffice] that are always fighting each other all the time’ (Interview, February 2013). NDPBstaff expressed similar concerns, citing:



The impact on our scarce resources of dealing with big departments that can’t join themselves up.... Theamount of data requests we’ve had to do, providing the same information on slightly different spreadsheetsbecause one part of the centre isn’t prepared to use another part of the centre’s spreadsheet and wants it in aslightly different format! (Interview, October 2013)

They also voiced repeated complaints about the constant need to ‘feed the machine’.‘Why have all that [delegation] and have this heavy hand of “Big Brother” parent depart-ment also trying to govern us?’ a senior NDPB official asked (Interview, February 2013).An NDPB Chairman similarly noted:

It just doesn’t make sense and it’s wasting an awful lot of precious civil service time which they really oughtto spend on their day jobs. Just give us an envelope of money. Tell us how many people we can employ. Tellus what we’re accountable for and what we’ve got to deliver at the end of the year and let us get on with it.If we don’t deliver it, sack us. It’s that easy! (Interview, October 2012)

These findings are supported by the Institute for Government’s report ‘It Takes Two’which similarly highlighted that ‘data requests and new controls from the centre sincethe advent of the Coalition have become a major source of irritation’ (Rutter et al. 2012,p. 8). In the long run, the report concluded, a ‘detailed micro-control regime risks afailure to take full advantage of the potential benefits of arm’s-length governance’ (p. 52).Such findings reveal that tightened central control and limited agency autonomy do notnecessarily deliver the form of efficiency and accountability gains often presumed fromsuch reforms (see Christensen and Lægreid 2007; Dubnick 2014). This finding forces us tostep back from a focus on the core executive and to examine the Coalition’s public bodiesreform agenda from the standpoint of meta-governance, leading us onto Argument 3 ofthis article. What’s particularly interesting about this perspective is explicitly recognizedby Cabinet Office officials.

Meta-governance is basically what we do. I was at a meeting yesterday themed around ‘meta-policy’ andwhether you call it ‘the policy for policy-making’ or ‘the governance of governance’ or ‘the strategy for strat-egy’ we are basically doing meta-governance in some way… We create the conditions that make it easierfor departments to govern. That might be signing-up the ministers, providing the guidance or facilitating adifferent mix of service providers. But we are basically ‘hands off’ – only sometimes ‘hands on’. (Interview,December 2013)

The research presented in this article provides a case study in meta-governance that res-onates with the state-centric or relational school of meta-governance (discussed above).The new government has undertaken a process of what could be termed collibration orselective/strategic adjustment, meaning that the vertical hierarchies of the state have notbeen subsumed or replaced by complex networks (supporting the arguments of Marsh(2011) and Fawcett (2009)). The rules of the game have clearly changed and new tools ofgovernance have been constructed. If anything the shadow of hierarchy – to paraphraseScharpf (1994) – has grown significantly darker for public bodies in the UK as was cap-tured in the description provided by one NDPB chair that his relationship with his sponsordepartment had ‘gone from an arm’s-length relationship to more like an arm-lock’ (Inter-view, September 2012).

As already mentioned, this process of reform can be located within post-NPM narra-tives drawn from a number of countries that emphasize centripetally oriented governancemodifications forged around strengthened hierarchical control (see, e.g. Dent 2005; Kinder2012). And yet the twist, hook, or barb in the results of this research is that once againsimplistic and zero-sum assumptions about pre-, current, or post-NPM stages of state



development falter against the ‘mad empiricism’ and ‘baroque confusion’ that Hood andDunsire (1978) identified in the British context nearly 40 years ago.

Put slightly differently, this research reveals that whilst the Coalition Government hasemphasized control it has underplayed order in pursuing its reforms. Despite the call fromnumerous official reports, parliamentary committees, think tanks, and academics aroundthe 2010 General Election for a future government to rationalize the complexity of theadministrative landscape beyond ministerial departments (of which NDPBs form just onelayer), the government rejected calls to undertake a more fundamental restructuring of thearm’s-length body landscape. In explaining this decision, Francis Maude rejected demandsto rationalize the complete institutional landscape by explaining, ‘I’m kind of temperamen-tally slightly allergic to trying to create a top-down overall scheme of arrangement. It isvery complex and confusing, and simplification is desirable but I think not in order to meetthe demands of administrative tidiness’ (HC 537 2011, Q141). (Although the select com-mittee rejected the minister’s logic (see HC 537 2011), the role of Francis Maude as botha facilitator of reform in relation to control and an obstacle to reform in relation to orderdeserves further research.)

From both a comparative perspective and the position of theories of meta-governance,the British case is therefore distinctive because of the Coalition’s attempt to manage com-plexity in one bureaucratic sphere (i.e. NDPBs) through increased control, while at exactlythe same time creating an ever more complex patchwork of arm’s-length bodies (in theform of ever more creative hybrid bodies, mutualizations, public–private partnerships)that exist beyond this tighter, more explicit, and formalized controls system. Although theCabinet Office may well have struck back in relation to NDPBs, serious questions thereforeremain about the Coalition’s broader approach to meta-governance, including whetherthe coalition have possessed and pursued a coherent vision within the current parliament,how they have advanced key principles such as accountability and transparency acrossgovernment (and the consistency of Coalition’s approach), and the extent to which changesin the Cabinet Office have been mirrored in the rest of the core executive (the Treasury andPrime Minister’s Office).

As the 2015 General Election approaches and a new phase of public bodies reform isoutlined, it will be possible to assess the coherence of this programme and the degree ofpolitical commitment to reform. Will, for example, attention turn to the larger and morecomplex NDPBs largely untouched by the 2010 review, or to hitherto unexamined forms ofarm’s-length governance such as mutuals and special health authorities? On the evidenceabove it appears that significant future reform may be elusive as the Coalition have notdeveloped a consistent, overarching schema for ongoing public bodies reform, meaningthere are likely to be significant internal barriers to future changes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We acknowledge support of ESRC Grant ES/J010553/1 ‘Shrinking the state: reformingarm’s length bodies’ (www.shrinkingthestate.org). We thank the anonymous reviewersfor their helpful comments.

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