Yesterdays Tomorrows What Happened to the Future of Government?

Professor Christopher Hood has been awarded a 3-year grant by the Leverhulme Trust to work with Dr Ruth Dixon on a study of changes to the way in which UK central government has worked over the past 35 years. They will be delving into archives and official data sets, conducting interviews and focus groups with current and retired players, and trying to put UK changes into cross-national perspective.

The period since the 1970s has seen at least three major changes in the working of the central state, namely the so-called New Public Management, the development of government information and communications technology and a new form of spin doctoring at the heart of government. As Christopher Hood puts it, Each of these changes has been much discussed on its own, and at least the first two of them have passionate advocates as well as trenchant detractors. But we know little about the combined effect of those three developments on the central government machine. Did they really transform the state and its capacity and did they lead to lower costs and better relations with citizen-customers? To answer that, we need to know as much about the old public management as about the new.

Ruth Dixon is Research Assistant, ESRC Public Services Programme.

Christopher Hood is Gladstone Professor of Government, Director of ESRC Public Services Programme on Quality, Performance and Delivery, Fellow, All Souls College.