Regulation Inside Government: Where New Public Management Meets the Audit Explosion

Abstract

This article explores the scale and growth of regulation inside UK government, defined as standard-setting and monitoring by bodies constituted at arm’s-length from those they oversee. It argues regulation inside government is comparable in scale to regulation of business and has grown sharply over two decades, while public organizations in general have substantially downsized. Regulation inside government is highly diverse and there is a marked disjunction between the control regimes applied by regulators of government to those they regulate and the way the regulators are themselves assessed and controlled.