N generations of reform in UK local government

What is it about?

The UK government under the Thatcher administration was one of the first to launch NPM-type reforms. Since then, several generations of reform initiatives can be identified in the UK – including the ‘quality’ initiative under Major, the Blair administration’s early emphasis on ‘Best Value’, followed by its emphasis on targets and inspection, and its reconversion to public governance concerns around 2004-06. The UK, then, represents an interesting test case for studying how several generations of reforms co-exist and interrelate. This article examines the imprint of past reforms in the current drive towards contestability and choice in local government modernization. It argues that coercive isomorphism has been evident in local government but that resistance has been successfully mounted against each generation of reforms, that these resistance efforts have themselves displayed isomorphic tendencies but that, nevertheless, a gradual move towards a mixed economy of provision has emerged in many local authorities.

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Why is it important?

This article suggests that there is telling evidence of a trend to isomorphism in English local government in many areas in which central government attempted to create change in the period up to 2006, including local make-or-buy decisions about service provision. However, there is, simultaneously, evidence of a range of highly successful resistance movements, both nationally and locally, against elements of the modernisation agenda, particularly the make-or-buy policies. The persistence of the competition, contestability and choice theme, perhaps the most unpopular element of the modernisation agenda, and its slow osmosis into the policies and practices of many local authorities which at first were highly resistant to it, suggests that it offers important benefits to key stakeholders that cannot easily be ignored, even when not entirely welcome. At the same time, the protracted and passionate resistance to this theme indicates it is believed to erode not only interests but values in the public sector. Intriguingly, this resistance by local authorities appears itself to have generated a potent form of isomorphism. Organizations within the field of UK local government share and communicate forms of resistance and locally acceptable adaptation to externally mandated institutional pressures. Further, shared forms of resistance and adaptation appear to constitute some of the key mechanisms of a complex adaptive system, thus linking neo-institutional perspectives and complexity. At the same time, there is room for agency - the persistent theme of competition, contestability and choice, in spite of all potential pitfalls, may well have been due to the skill of its adherents in hiding it when the wind of reform has changed, rather than making a stand. They have also had to be flexible, recognizing that some local authorities have responded in imaginative ways to these tensions, even sometimes developing new types of market relationships very different from those found in private sector markets (e.g. the possibilities for citizens and service users to become co-producers of public services), resulting in a new conception of the ‘market’ for public services and the concepts of competition, contestability and choice.

Perspectives