The politics of managerial reform in UK local government: a study of control, conflict and resistance 1880s to present

Abstract

The article examines the political origins and impact of recent managerial reform (the shift from the professional bureaucracy model of public administration to the new public management [NPM]) in UK local government. Two key drivers of managerial reform are identified: central–local relations and labour management. The former are historically complex due, partly, to the Victorian expediential justification of local government, and the tenuous constitutional status of local government in the British polity. These factors necessitate and permit central control with models of public administration a key mechanism for achieving this. In addition, as 70% of overall sector costs are made up of centrally funded labour costs, the centre's attempts to control labour management (pay and performance) is a second key driver of managerial reform. And models of public administration, again, are a major mechanism for achieving central control. The analysis is rooted in a brief historical examination of developments from the 1880s, and a longitudinal case study examining more recent developments to illustrate the general case made. Empirical findings show councillor, union and worker resistance to managerial reform. They also show job loss, work intensification, job insecurity and demoralisation of staff. Another key finding is that NPM is not new, but a regression to the Victorian era.

Keywords::

• public service reform
• political economy
• new public management
• central–local relations
• labour management
• public administration

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Richard Croucher (Middlesex) and two referees for their careful reading of earlier drafts of this paper, and for their invaluable criticisms and suggestions for improvement.

Notes

^1.Adler, “Been There, Done That!”; Chomsky, Profit Over People.

^2.Bach, “Europe: Changing Public Service.”

^3.Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization; Du Gay, “Without Affection or Enthusiasm.” The bureaucratic model is characterised by hierarchy, standardisation and professional autonomy.

^4.Pollitt, Managerialism and the Public Services; Hoggett, “A New Management in the Public Sector?”. The new public management model is characterised by decentralisation, a preference for markets, networks and managerialism.

^5.Roper, Higgins and James, “Shaping the Bargaining Agenda.”

^6.Entwistle and Laffin, “A Prehistory of the Best Value Regime,” note that the need for central control was due to local Party activists proving electorally embarrassing to Labour in the 1980s.

^7.Laffin, “Local Government Modernisation”; Hayek, “The Moral Imperative”; and McIlroy, “Waving or Drowning?”

^8.Rouban, “Back to the Nineteenth Century.”

^9.Local Government Association, Local Government Earnings Survey. Local government remains a vital part of the infrastructure of the UK economy and an integral component of the UK polity, accounting for a quarter of public spending delivering core services including education and social services. It employs 2.7 m people, one-eighth of the overall UK workforce. Women account for 75% of the workforce with large numbers of black and ethnic minority workers (8% across the UK but increasing to 36% in London boroughs).

^10.Chandler, “A Rationale for Local Government.”

^11.Gill-McLure and Seifert, “Degrading the Labourer”; Ashworth and Entwistle, “The Contingent Relationship”; and Bach and Kessler, The Modernisation of the Public Services.

^12.Jeannot, “Changer la fonction publique.” Exceptions to this tendency in the UK can be found in, for example, Ironside and Seifert's, Industrial Relations in Schools and Carter and Stevenson's “Teachers, Workforce Remodelling.” These authors use a political economy and labour process approach. Ashworth and Entwistle's “The Contingent Relationship” uses an institutional theory approach to examine the possibility of links between labour management and public service reform. And Bach and Kessler'sThe Modernisation of the Public Services attempts to develop a new framework that looks at the links between public management literatures and employment relations dimensions of public service reform. But, these studies are exceptions to the norm.

^13.Suchting, Marx and Philosophy, 81. This is taken from Suchting's discussion around the term ‘dialectical materialism’. He points out that the term did not occur in Marx's writings but that Marx did consider himself as using a ‘dialectical method’. Suchting is commenting here on an example from Capital 1 where Marx writes about “the tendency of capital to reduce as much as possible the number of workers employed, i.e. the amount of its variable component, the part which is changed into labour-power … which stands in contradiction with its other tendency to produce the greatest possible mass of surplus-value”.

^14.Berthelot, Epistemologie, 484 quoted in Samuel, “Is Law Really a Social Science.”

^15.Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 66–7.

^16.Mill, Utilitarianism.

^17.Booth, Life and Labour.

^18.Chandler, “A Rationale for Local Government”; Wilson and Game, Local Government in the United Kingdom, 21.

^19.Dearlove and Saunders, Introduction to British Politics.

^20.Widdicombe, “The Conduct of Local Authority Business”; Elcock, Local Government; and Bogdanor, The New British Constitution, 235.

^21.Chandler, “A Rationale for Local Government”; Bevir and Rhodes, Interpreting British Governance.

^22.Mill, Principles of Political Economy.

^23.Clay, The Problem of Industrial Relations; Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History; and Engels and Marx, On Britain.

^24.Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Bk.V.Ch.Xl.s.4; Mill, Utilitarianism; and Widdicombe, “The Conduct of Local Authority Business,” para. 3.19.

^25.Widdicombe, Ibid., para. 3.15.

^26.Cochrane, Whatever Happened to Local Government, 10.

^27.Wilson and Game, Local Government in the United Kingdom, 19.

^28.Wilson and Game, Ibid., 22

^29.Wilson and Game, Ibid., 23.

^30.Wilson and Game, Ibid.

^31.Wilson and Game, Ibid.

^32.Widdicombe, “The Conduct of Local Authority Business,” para. 3.11.

^33.Mill, Principles of Political Economy; Cochrane, Whatever Happened to Local Government.

^34.Widdicombe, “The Conduct of Local Authority Business”; Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State; Spoor, White-Collar Union; and Dix and Williams, Serving the Public.

^35.Chisholm and Leach, “Dishonest Government”; Jackson, “Central Control of Local Expenditure.”

^36.Bains, The New Local Authorities.

^37.Office of National Statistics, “Public Sector Employment.”

^38.Local Government Management Board, Pay in Local Government.

^39.Chisholm, Structural Reform of Local Government, 11.

^40.Hoggett, “A New Management in the Public Sector?”

^41.Aucoin, “Administrative Reform in Public Management.”

^42.Donajgrodski, “New Roles for Old,” 82.

^43.Tawney, The Acquisitive Society; Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.

^44.Mill, Utilitarianism.

^45.Cockburn, The Local State.

^46.Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State.

^47.Robson, “From Patronage to Proficiency”; Shepherd, George Lansbury.

^48.Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State; Cochrane, Whatever Happened to Local Government.

^49.Hadow, “Departmental Committee”; Spoor, White-Collar Union. NALGO was established in 1905.

^50.Hadow, “Departmental Committee,” para. 125.

^51.Spoor, White-Collar Union, 119.

^52.National Board for Prices and Incomes, “Pay and Conditions of Manual Workers,” para. 63.

^53.Mallaby, Committee on Staffing; Bains, The New Local Authorities.

^54.Spoor, White-Collar Union.

^55.National Board for Prices and Incomes, “Pay of Chief and Senior Officers.”

^56. Ibid., paras. 22–3.

^57. Ibid., para. 57.

^58.Bains, The New Local Authorities; Elcock, Local Government.

^59.Hyman, “Industrial Conflict”; Newman, Path to Maturity; and Dix and Williams, Serving the Public.

^60.Bain and Price, “Union Growth.”; Gill-McLure, “The Political Economy of Public Sector Trade Union Militancy under Keynesianism.”

^61.Chisholm, Structural Reform of Local Government, 12.

^62.Cochrane, “Local Employment Initiatives”; Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State.

^63.Bacon and Eltis, Britain's Economic Problems.

^64.Hayek, “The Moral Imperative.”; Hayek, “The Trade Unions and Britain's Economic Decline.”

^65.Dunleavy, Democracy, Bureaucracy; Pollitt, Managerialism and the Public Services.

^66.Niskanen, Bureaucracy; Hill, The Public Policy Process; and Pollitt, “Bureaucracy and Democracy,” 160.

^67.Hood, “A Public Management.”

^68. Ibid.

^69.Priestley, “Royal Commission”; Local Government Management Board, Framework and Flexibility. However, around 500 authorities in the South of England did opt out of national bargaining. See Gill, “Decentralisation and Devolution.”

^70.Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State.

^71.Pollitt, Managerialism and the Public Services.

^72.Hood, “‘The New Public Management’”; Rouban, “Back to the Nineteenth Century.”

^73.Duncan and Goodwin, The Local State.

^74.Public Services Privatisation Research Unit, Privatisation; Gill-McLure and Seifert “Degrading the Labourer.”

^75. The larger study was undertaken in 1995–2000.

^76. Unions interviewed: NUPE – National Union of Public Employees – (who merged with NALGO and COHSE to form UNISON in 1993) and GMB activists and officers (the two major unions organising manual workers). Managers interviewed included chief and senior personnel officers at central and service levels, technical officers administering CCT and BV.

^77. See for example, the work of the Manchester Employment Research Group, Hands Off Bury Bins, against voluntary outsourcing in the early 1980s.

^78.Gill “Decentralisation and Devolution.” This was also the case in other authorities, as this study of 1994 showed. The tables used here represent the bargaining and management structures at authority level. Knowledge of labour relations at this level is scarce, as the relatively limited research into local government IR tends to focus on national level bargaining.

^79.Local Government Information Unit, Externalisation under Scrutiny; Audit Commission, Preparing for Compulsory Competitive Competition, Drummond, “Theories of Devolution.”

^80.Clegg, “Standing Commission,” para. 99.

^81.Escott and Whitfield, The Gender Impact of CCT.

^82.UNISON, Budget Briefing.

^83.Kirkpatrick, “The Worst of Both Worlds?”

^84.Boyne et al., “Competitive Tendering”; Richardson et al., “Best Value”; and Gill-McLure, “Fighting Marketization.”

^85. School budgets were devolved to schools under the Local Management of Schools initiative in the 1980s.

^86.McIlroy, “New Labour, New Unions”; Entwistle and Laffin, “A Prehistory of the Best Value Regime.”

^87.Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Handling Workforce. BV however continues to run in Scotland.

^88. Considered the worst cuts since the war, see Labour Research, “Coalition Slash.”

^89.Labour Research, “What Will We Face.”

^90.Local Government Association, Delivering through People; Improvement and Development Agency, Delivering through People; and Local Government Employers, Delivering a Rewarding Future.

^91.Suchting, Marx and Philosophy, 81; Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique, 66–7.

^92. Here are some existing studies from this perspective: Johnstone, Success While Others Fail; Adler, “Been There, Done That!; Gill-McLure, “Fighting Marketization”; and Rouban, “Back to the Nineteenth Century.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Whyeda Gill-McLure

Whyeda Gill-McLure is a Senior Lecturer in HRM & Employment Relations at the University of Wolverhampton. Her main research interests lie in public service reform and the political economy of local government industrial relations. She has published on the impact of neoliberal reforms and marketisation on public services and public service workers. Her work includes a survey of local government BME workers under marketisation (a collaborative study with colleagues from Keele). She is currently undertaking a history of the Local Government Employers Organisation 1991–Present.