1. Thirty Years of Executive Agencies in Britain
Analysing Efficiency, Coordination & Accountability
Dr Thomas Elston

3. “the death of a paradigm?” (Colin Campbell & Graham Wilson, 1995
“most ambitious attempt at civil service reform in the twentieth century” (Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, 1990)
“the death of a paradigm?” (Colin Campbell & Graham Wilson, 1995
Colin Campbell and Graham Wilson, 1995

5. Excl. Scotland, Wales and NI
Whole UK
2017
Excl. Scotland, Wales and NI
38 EAs in England in 2017 – Public Bodies Report
9 EAs in Scotland in 2018 – Wiki

9. Efficiency? Outputs achieved per unit of input Decentralization
Scale diseconomies
Deregulation
Duplication of support functions
Focus
Monitoring and audit costs
Re-organization costs
Salary competition

10. Coordination? Mutual adjustment of interdependent decisions
Bring “in-house” interdependent decisions / reduce external interdependencies
Create silos / undermine “joined-up” government

11. Accountability? Ex-post processes that foster real-time responsibility
Transparency
Department-agency blame-games
Institutionalized reporting
Programme-level reporting
“Accountable management”

12. The future?
How can agencies “share” duplicated support services without returning to the centralization that proved so inefficient pre-1988?
How can we harness the benefits and the mitigate challenges of organizational silos?
How can we protect both senior officials and politicians – and, ultimately, the public – against blame games?

13. Read more about the evolution of Next Steps agencies here