Public Management and Administration: a Need for Evolution

Recently, British public management has relied too much on private sector approaches suited to market-facing situations, to the detriment of systems based on a realistic estimate of the special nature of public business, and its needs for economy and co-ordination. Accountability processes have suffered from over-simplification (targetry) and from a gross multiplication of mechanisms focusing on individual error, as opposed to ensuring intelligent assessment of business results. There has been an over-emphasis on management of inputs and outputs, as opposed to systems gearing the result-producing mechanisms to means for policy formation and co-ordination of effort. We need now to re-think and define properly the systems whereby ministers are advised, account is rendered, resources are allocated and effort is co-ordinated-and the qualifications of the relevant actors. Suggestions are made to these ends.