Introduction
New Public Management (NPM) came to the fore under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s as a radical set of policy prescriptions for curing the perceived ills of the public sector.
Its proponents argued that wasteful and unfriendly public services could be transformed by introducing traditionally private sector ideas such as contracts and competition. Instead of providing services, the government’s role would be to purchase them from specialist providers, some in the public sector and some in the private sector. Contracts (or pseudo-contracts where both parties were in the public sector1) would be used to set targets for the cost and quality of the services to be delivered, and competition for government business would motivate providers, whether public or private, to meet their targets.The relationship between NPM and the government’s accountability for the delivery of public services was a complex and contested one. Its advocates argued that NPM would improve accountability in two main respects. First, government departments would have a clearer sense of what services they were providing and how much they cost. Better information would enhance politicians’ accountability to the electorate. Second, NPM emphasized the direct accountability of public services to citizens and service users, who were often referred to (in private sector terminology) as ‘consumers’. For example, a contract might require the provider to reduce the level of user complaints or, more radically, users themselves might be given the right to choose among possible providers of a particular public service. By contrast, the critics of NPM argued that the division of responsibility between government and contractors would create obstacles to accountability. Most obviously, if something went wrong, the government and the contractor might blame each other for the problem, making it difficult for Parliament or the electorate to determine where responsibility lay.
While the concept of NPM and the debate surrounding the accountability of public services delivered through NPM mechanisms are relatively familiar to public lawyers, there is much less awareness of how NPM has developed under the Labour governments from 1997—2010, and under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition since 2010.
Although NPM is particularly associated with Thatcherism, it has not been abandoned. Rather, it has continued to evolve in significant ways. In this chapter, it will be argued that while NPM in its original form did present some problems for accountability, it was broadly compatible with traditional understandings of the role of the state and the accountability of politicians to the electorate for the delivery of public services. The more recent evolutions of NPM—which have been the subject of much less public attention and scholarly analysis—are much more worrying from an accountability perspective because they call into question the very role of the government.The chapter will proceed as follows. In Part B, we will examine the relationship between NPM and accountability by way of background. Part C will outline the evolution of NPM since 1997, focusing on the emergence of what will be termed ‘deep’ NPM—in which the government contracts out the purchasing of services as well as the provision of services—and ‘post’ NPM, where specialization in service provision is rejected in favour of grouping services together, both within and across public bodies. Part D offers the use of commissioning support in the National Health Service (NHS) as an example of deep NPM, and Part E considers recent reforms in local government as a case study of post NPM. Each illustration focuses in particular on the implications of these developments for accountability. Part F concludes.
B.