What is it about?
In recent years, public expenditure cuts and public concern about failures in public services have attracted more attention to the performance of public organizations around the world. This chapter examines an ambitious reform programme designed to improve the performance of local public services in England. It reviews the theoretical framework that informed the governance and management reforms and then highlights how these influenced the strategies adopted. Survey results are reported on the impacts of various elements of this strategy. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications for policy (and future evaluations) of large-scale reform programmes.
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Why is it important?
Assessing the impacts of high profile, large-scale programmes such as the Local Government Modernisation Agenda (LGMA) in the UK is inherently difficult. Their effects are inevitably mediated by local conditions. It is not easy to disentangle 'effects' from 'exogenous influences' - and, in the absence of a control group that was not exposed to LGMA policies, it is impossible to establish with certainty the causality behind statistically significant relationships in the analysis. The results of the descriptive and regression analyses, however, point to some potentially important implications for policymakers and suggest intriguing possibilities for future research.
Perspectives
This research suggests that central and local government policies associated with top-down performance management proved more potent from 1997 to 2010 than the introduction of market mechanisms or policies that gave users influence over services. Although some influential voices in Whitehall pushed strongly for ‘competition and contestability’ strategies during this period, they generally did not prevail over strategies of top-down performance management. However, this battle has by no means been settled – we therefore need more research that can contribute to better understanding of the optimum policy mixes to achieve different kinds of performance improvement.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Top-Down Strategies for Service Improvement in UK Public Services, January 2017, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190646059.003.0006.
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