Accountability, control and complexity: moving beyond ministerial responsibility

Abstract

There are several bodies of opinion showing concern and even excitement over the wide variety of governmental bodies which has grown up in modern Britain. On the right in politics there are the anti-state critics of bureaucracy who want to see public powers cut back and expenditures reduced. For them these bodies are symptomatic of a public sector out of control. Generally on the left-hand side of the political spectrum are those who dislike appointed boards and commissions for the patronage they represent and their remoteness from popular or democratic control. Such critics often approve of the particular activities carried out by this or that body but are suspicious of the elitism and the claims to technical expertise held to be an inherent risk in such administrative devices. On more neutral ground we can find many administrative practitioners and academic students of administration who are worried for rather different reasons. What they suspect is that we may be witnessing the disintegration of the model of representative and responsible ministerial government which took shape in Britain in the course of the last century. Indeed this model was wider in range than the institution of ministerial responsibility itself: in some respects it encompassed local government too through the conferment of statutory powers on elected councils. In other words, the underlying principle established was that of representative and responsible government, and its concomitant organisational model was, at the centre, the Government ministry or Department.