APPLAUSE I hope this is working. Is it working? Good. And thank you very much Matthew for the introduction, I had hoped you might go on for about 40 minutes, but I see now that the moment of truth has arrived and I have to start talking. However, I can avoid that for a moment by doing some housekeeping
which I've been instructed to do, you understand, I'm obedient. I need to point out that in the Lancaster Room from 2.50 pm until 4.50 pm there is a Policy and Politics, most cited papers panel which, I am assured, will enable anyone, who wants to publish in any journal to have instant success if they listen to the words of wisdom from the authors of the most cited papers in the history of Policy and Politics nay, the world, the universe. So don't miss that.
Did I do that all right? Was that OK? Good. Thank you also to David and Sarah for inviting me. I don't think I have
the Bristol credentials that some of your other plenary speakers have had so I'm doubly delighted
to be invited as a kind of outsider. I have been to Bristol before, but that's about it. It was a long time ago. However, you probably didn't realise
when you invited me, that it would coincide so exactly, with my return to the United Kingdom
after 16 years. My stuff was delivered to an apartment in Brighton last Friday. And if I have bits of cardboard still stuck to me,
that is the reason why. So this is like a double homecoming
- domestic and academic and I'm still a little bit disorientated by it all. As was the case with Rod's presentation this morning, there is a paper, a substantial paper, full of the usual academic paraphernalia and if any of you wish to access that,
just send me an email. I don't think it's on a website anywhere yet, but I'd be happy to send you a copy. So now, we get to the beginning. I thought it was an appropriate topic, for this conference, for obvious reasons. I would stress that this is public management form in UK central government, I say very little about local government which, I've had a number of discussions with people who actually know about local government,
unlike me and they suggest to me
that things are rather different there. And I'm happy to accept their expert judgement. So this is just about central government reforms. There are a number of reasons why I think that this is a reasonably important topic. Not least that we've had so many of these reforms and we continue to have, a very high volume of structural and process type reforms, in central government. Now, if I begin with what is relatively the good news Um, something slightly funny has gone... It's cutting off the top of my slides It's probably not desperately important but if anybody knows how to fix that, The top of the the slide says.. "The UK as a world leader in public management reform" and some evidence for that is, simply the volume of reform that we've had almost unceasing. Every now and then you get two or three years without something being, but.. basically, fairly unceasing,
large scale reforms 1970 - 2012. A lot of people talk about
the New Zealand catharsis of 1984-1993 as the most pure and radical piece of public management reform in recent history. I would argue that the British record is of even more radical reform because the British intensity of reform may not have been quite equal to that spike in New Zealand,
but it's gone on for much, much longer. New Zealand has calmed down after 1993. And they hadn't done much at all before 1984. Whereas in the UK, it has gone on, and on, and on. UK examples, in consequence perhaps, are very frequently cited
in the international literature. I'm not talking about the specifically domestic literature here. Both the practitioner literature
and the academic literature. The Cabinet Office and DfID and its predecessors have been active internationally for many years in actively promoting, marketing, selling, UK management ideas and practices. And in my wanderings around the world
I've several times bumped into Cabinet Office people who are frankly selling,
one or other aspect of the British model. And the international organizations which have been centrally engaged in developing, the international practitioner thinking, and rhetoric, on public management reform, have been organizations which have been quite heavily populated by Brits or quite heavily influenced by British ideas. So in all those respects, the UK has been, a leader and a major player globally, in public management reform. I have, in the paper,
a citation of Stephen Dorrell who was then a junior treasury minister, making a speech in 1993,
during the Major administration, where he said, very directly, "The marketizing reforms of Thatcher and Major.." "..are a model which the whole of the rest of the world is now following.." "..and it's not surprising, because they work.". This is a somewhat megalomaniac vision
of the role of the UK, but not entirely without echoes overseas. So that's the good news. We can award ourselves a gold medal for public management reform. Now let's turn to the slightly less good news. If we ask some questions about this reform, I would argue that we find a number of slightly, curious or disturbing features. First of all, there's remarkably little, reliable and warranted knowledge, of the actual outcomes, of any of this reform. That's not to say that there aren't
endless stories and anecdotes. Particularly in the practitioner world, but also in the academic world, about what's been successful and what's not. But in terms of the kind of stuff, that orthodox social sciences, if such creatures still exist, would regard as reasonably firm evidence, there is practically none. And I'm not standing out
as a radical commentator here. I believe in saying that
I'm fairly much mainstream, in the academic world. I think Rod Rhodes and Christopher Hood, who was here this morning,
would both probably say, much the same thing.
And so would a number of other people. Secondly, which is in a way, more disturbing than the first point, there's very little sign that the governments, who have carried out these reforms, have themselves been, in the least bit interested in discovering the consequences. I could come back to that if you like. But what Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, have recently, more or less, completed, a massive statistical exercise, on the Thatcher and Major, efficiency reforms, of the 1980s and early 1990s. And the broad conclusion they've come to, is that there was no measurable efficiency gain. Yes, of course, you know you can look at individual, reign of scrutinies, or whatever, and you can find quite significant gains, and little bits of savings. But when you look at the big picture
of departmental running costs, and departmental outputs, insofar as there is any official data by which you can measure those things, they do not show, a significant efficiency, gain. There's a little bit of bumping up and down
over time, but overall, no. And again, I think, Christopher would say, that one of the most curious
aspects of this is that, it's he, and Ruth Dixon, who've been left researching this
in 2010, 2011, 2012. Because the governments themselves, neither ministers, nor senior civil servants, have shown ANY interest
in putting this data together before. They've shown no interest in checking whether, the programmes they themselves have instigated, have actually resulted in
the things that they said they'd result in. That's not to say that nothing has been learned, I do want to emphasise, that I think in terms of, the process of reform, obviously, so many senior officials
have been involved in it, that many of them will have picked up
all sorts of useful practitioner wisdom about how you do this stuff. but that's very different from, having knowledge of what the, final outcomes and effects are.
Whether efficiency, in terms of a ratio between inputs and outputs, or the effectiveness, of public services, or the, the ultimate perceived quality
as far as the citizens using those services.. Have any of those things changed,
as a result of the reforms? That's a different kind of knowledge. And that seems to be much more
thin on the ground. What I'd like to do
very, very quickly just to, fill in the picture a little bit,
and give you a little bit more evidence, is to look at, a sample or a selection, of some of the big reform white papers,
over the 40 year period. And to ask about, their content. The continuities and the discontinuities in them. And these are the ones that I've chosen. The Heath government 1970 reorganization, the Thatcher 1981, efficiency in government. John Major's citizen's charter. Blair's modernising government, which would have been a little bit earlier if he hadn't had problems with the relevant minister, and the more recent coalition
open public services white paper, which I'm sure you'll all be much more
familiar with than I. All these are, They're chosen deliberately
because they are broad scope, public management reform programmes. They're not confined to one sector. Obviously there have been lots more reform white papers than that. Thatcher's 1989, working for patients reform of the National Health Service, was a huge reform, but it was a sectoral reform. These are horizontal reforms. They all come reasonably early
in the life of the government. So you could say, that this is before these governments have been
blown to badly off-course. Perhaps you could argue,
that they embody, some of the fresh ideas that these governments have brought
into government and hope to implement. Now changes and continuities. Looking across these five, white papers. First of all, a very obvious, perhaps slightly superficial change, is that the white papers have got much longer,
and they're no longer white. They've become much glossier.
They are written in a different way now, they're written in a kind of populist, jargon. The first two, the dividing line there, comes between the 1970 and 1981, on the one hand, and John Major's citizen's charter. Somewhere in the 1980s, the nature of these white papers changed. Before that,
they were essentially the government deigning to tell the rest of us how they were going to put their own house in order. It was like, "We're going to do this..", "we" being the authority
on the machinery of government, indeed it was then called
the machinery of government, "and we're going to adjust
the machinery in this way", "in order to achieve these improvements". And the first two are focussed
very much on ministries. So the reorganization of central government,
was about central government. It was about central policy making machinery, and big ministries. The 1981 thing was about, efficiencies and saving money and cutting out waste, by applying business-like techniques, primarily in ministries. The later ones have broadened their scope. to include the whole of the public sector, and by the 2011 white paper, beyond the public sector. You can think of this as a shift in governance
if you want to be fancy about it, but certainly many more actors
are being brought in. The 1999 Blair white paper, very much included, local authorities, partners, in the non-profit and for-profit sectors. It covered a much wider range
than the earlier papers. So that's something of a change.
The field of activity, or the scope of ideas
about public management reform, seems to have enlarged very considerably. Another change is that, connected with this co-owner voice thing, is that the citizen was barely, present, in the first two white papers, it was an addressee
that played no other part in them. in the first two, government was just saying
what it was going to do with its own stuff. By the time you get to the 2011 white paper, the citizen is smattered all over it. Or a notional citizen, perhaps I should say, is smattered all over it. And it's the same citizen who is, much mentioned, in the Blair 1999 white paper
"Modernising Government". It is the actively choosing, consumer style citizen. John Clarke and Janet Newman
have each written, very persuasively, and given some fine grain to, to this discussion of how this image, of the citizen has been gradually, or sometimes rather rapidly, transformed into the consumer citizen, who still seems to be the most popular, kind of citizen with the coalition government, as he, or she, was with the Blair and Brown administrations. Now for the continuity. Now the continuity is rather striking, when you see it. But it's.. It's not necessarily, obvious. It's kind of one of those things
that suddenly strikes you. Now these are documents about management. primarily. Policy making, but mainly about management. They all share, right over the forty year period, three characteristics and all three are the absence of something. First of all, none of them documents the need for reform. They provide virtually no evidence on that. The nearest you come to evidence, is the mention of a stereotype, usually. We must reduce bureaucracy. We must make the administration
more responsive to citizens. In the latest one, the accusation that the public sector has, not merely ignored but in some ways, actively amplified inequalities between services to different groups
of citizens in different areas etc. etc. No evidence is offered for this, whatsoever, in any of these papers. it maybe true I'm not saying it's untrue,
I'm just saying that these white papers are evidently not
the vehicle for persuading us, by offering us any evidence. Secondly, none of them has any targets. Now these are management documents. They're white papers,
but they're about management. You might say,
in the era of performance management, you would expect them to have some targets.
They don't. The nearest things to targets occur in the, 1991 citizen's charter. Where there are some things which, If you are reasonably generous
in your use of language, you could say that they are quasi targets, that we will have certain things in place, within a number of years. And third, and perhaps most important,
or most surprising of all, none of them are costed. There are no costings in, anywhere. Some of these reforms, absolutely gigantic, We know how expensive reorganization can be, in all sorts of ways. The transactional costs, and sometimes the direct costs of reform, are very considerable. If you don't believe me,
go and read some of the National Audit Office reports, on some recent
central government reorganisations. And that information is just not there. So do they,
in the absence of costs or targets, do they have any built-in
method of checking or evaluation? Answer.. No. In none of them, except, again, the citizen's charter. Which, of course, many of us, mea culpa, laughed at, at the time. You remember, the Steve Bell cartoons, of John Major
wearing Superman underpants and all that. A lot of fun was made of the citizen's charter, but actually
it was the only one of these reforms, where there was
a staged programme of assessment and reassessment, with a degree of independence in that. And reporting to parliament. So there were one, two, three...
I think at least three, evaluations going out. Two years, five years.. of what was happening. So, this is a bit strange, this is a strange kind of reform. If you go into other areas, away from public management, you would expect white papers to have some evidence, to have some costings,
and to have some targets, but we don't get that, in public management reform. But what we do get is a lot of promises. They're not short on promises. These are just the kernel of these papers. 1970: more coordinated, strategic approach. 1981: Modern business techniques, will eliminate waste and lower public spending etc. etc. You can see them up there. I've already said, we don't have much evidence
about what happened, but can we get any handle at all on, on whether these promises were met? I would say, a little bit, but it's often very difficult. 1970: more coordinated,
strategic approach to policy making if you think about the last year
of the Heath administration and its fall I think you will be stretching a point to describe that as coordinated and strategic. And indeed, some of the, instruments and processes,
which Heath introduced were, were subsequently ditched. The rational policy making models
of programme analysis and review, the central policy review stuff. The giant departments didn't last long. Central policy review stuff
lasted into the Thatcher era, but it was a very much weakened animal. And so on.. Better evidence based. Who knows? Interesting that evidence based policy making, is not actually the flavour of 2012, but it was the flavour of 1970.
Of October 1970 and it comes back every now and then,
ever since. 1981: modern business techniques, will eliminate waste and lower public spending. Well there is no doubt,
that in some specific instances, they increased efficiency, and lowered costs. However.. the work I've already referred to by Hood and Dixon, and other work by Dunleavy, and earlier work, also by Christopher Hood, with Andrew Dunsire, seems to indicate that, number one, public expenditure as a percentage of GDP, certainly didn't go down during the Thatcher era. It was more or less exactly the same
at the end as it was the beginning. And secondly, it now seems that, while there may have been local efficiency gains, there was no overall systemic efficiency gain
across central government. So, there's a bit of a question mark
against that promise. 1991, I'm amazed to find myself standing here, as a kind of apologist for the citizen's charter, because again, this is the only one where you can say "Well, yes actually, this did happen". The citizen's charter may well not have been the only thing pushing it to happen. I was somewhat involved in research
around that at the time, and yes. It was easy to make fun of it, but there was, some kind of a shift, during that decade, during the nineties, and having targets and
getting more information became, if not universal, at least, the norm. And far more widespread
than it had been ten years earlier. So maybe, on that one. 1999. Joined-up government. Evidence-based policy making partnerships, e-government enhanced.. It was a bit of a pot pourri. As for joined-up government, it's hard to read the, endless, and ever-more detailed accounts of the relationship between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister as a sterling example
of joined-up government. And it's hard to read, the various accounts which have emerged to the so-called sofa-based policy making, as indicative of, very heavily, evidence linked, policy making. But certainly,
some interesting documentation came out. The Cabinet Office produced some very nice, neat guides as to how to do it, Whether they actually did it?
Very hard to say. 2011: Obviously, much too soon to make a judgement about that. Quite interesting in the way in which, the meaning of some of the terms, seem to shift in that white paper, so, equality seemed to take on
a new kind of meaning, and, plurality seems to take on a new kind of meaning, meaning competition and contracting out. But we won't go into that. As for outcomes, we just don't know yet. So, the obvious question is "why?", if I'm even half-way right about this, that we've had a generation of massive change, undoubtedly costly in time and effort, and to some extent, in money. And all this was done without any
very clear targets. Without any costings. And without any follow through to check. That's quite surprising! How could that be? Why would that be? Well let's look at some reasons why
there was so little hard evidence. I'd say there's two, big,
obvious groups of reasons. One.. And this is not the fault of Blair,
or Thatcher, or Heath, or anybody else, t's just damned difficult, to design and implement, monitoring evaluation for big,
complex reforms of this kind, for a whole raft of reasons which many people have written about. Including myself. The reforms, themselves,
do not stand still. You don't take a model and implement it. What happens is that the model changes, in the process of implementation. The process of implementation usually takes,
at least a year or two. And the context also changes, as you are going through the process, so that the thing that eventually
gets implemented is not exactly, and sometimes not at all, the thing that you thought you were going to implement at the beginning. It's a moving picture. Even if you do an evaluation, even if you set one up. You have to set it up theoretically. In orthodox terms you have to set it up before you make the change, so that you've got before and after measurements, and that's often very difficult to do, both politically and even administratively. And then afterwards, even if you manage to collect some data on changes and outcomes, you usually have great difficulty attributing them, to that specific reform. Or, if you thought you could attribute something, to let's say the modernising government programme of 1999, how on Earth would you know which bit of that pot pourri it was that was actually the crucial bit? Or which two bits? Or which three bits? Because it's unlikely that the whole thing had, some kind of combined positive effect. It's much more likely that some things worked and some things doesn't. This is the whole realistic evaluation tradition, of Tilley and Pawson.
That's the language I'm using at the moment. So there are big, methodological problems, even if, academics had got huge grants
to do evaluations and we'd been able to have access
and to be independent it would still have been, rather difficult to do. However, the second group of reasons. coming on top of the first, is the, the reason I've already mentioned. That, on the whole, The Whitehall elite seem to have been remarkably uninterested in doing this kind of evaluation. Anyway, political interest seldom sustained over the whole life-cycle of a major reform. Even if the government, the same government, is still in power, individuals will have moved on. In some cases,
evaluations are actively resisted. I was around in the late 1980s, well, no, 1990 it would have been, trying to get grants to, trying to get research grants
from the SRC to look at the impact of the
'working for patients' white paper, on the organization of the NHS. And at one point, my dear colleague, Steve Harrison, and I were, in the department of health, and, how shall I say, it was made clear to us that
messages had been received, that academic attention, to the impact of these reforms, was not welcome. It was considered premature, and the idea was,
the reforms should be allowed to settle down before anyone did any. Now that didn't stop
some academics from doing work. But it certainly handicapped them from doing it, because the access was difficult, funding was difficult, and they were doing it
all retrospectively. When the reform was already
half over, so to speak. And that was a huge, the largest organization, and the most complex organization in Europe, barring, some people say, the Red Army, which was still in existence then. Unprecedented, kind of internal market reform, which had never been tried anywhere. Crying out for some sort of evaluation? No. Not necessary. We know it's right. So sometimes the evaluation
is just not thought about. Sometimes the evaluation is actually resisted. Even if you have them, politicians tend not to wait for the results, until you move on to the next thing. I'll give you a quote. It's from a personal correspondence, from a permanent secretary,
who was very heavily involved in the the Major and Blair reforms. And he wrote this, "governments lack a theory of.." "..and experience of.." "..embedding change coherently.." "..so the people involved and the storylines.." "..the people involved and the storylines.." "..are dropped and changed too quickly". The same person, informed me that in his view, two years after the 1999
'modernising government' white paper, basically, the prime minister
and his entourage, and senior minsters,
were no longer interested in that agenda at all. Their public service reform ideas
had moved on. Us academics, hadn't even started publishing on it. You know, we were getting very excited, but up there, at the summits of power, it was already something.. Yes. It wasn't rejected, No. There was nothing wrong with it.
Yes. It wasn't rejected, No. There was nothing wrong with it. It's just not interesting anymore.
It's history, as they say. So there are two groups of reasons, now.. Why has there been so much reform then? One might ask. To some extent,
this has been an international wave. And we are not alone. But I would like to argue that there is a degree of
UK exceptionalism in this for reasons that I'll briefly describe. First of all we're in the Anglo-Saxon club, of enthusiasts for managerialism. So that includes Australia, New Zealand. US is an interesting case, because they talk the talk,
but they don't walk the walk at all because they have constitutional and problems with the legislature, and with all sorts of vested interests, that cramp the president's style,
if he wants to reorganise anything. And many of the American departments are the same as they were 20 years ago. They haven't been serially reorganised. But they talk the talk. They certainly have the managerialist, language. And a lot of their procedures and processes are quite managerialist. But we have to remember, and those of you who've looked at, any of my work over the last 15 years, will be bored with hearing me say and write this. We have to remember that the Anglo-Saxon club of which we are a leading member, is not the whole world. And that there are many, important, complexed, advanced, states out there, who really have not been
so dramatically interested in this. Or they've pretended, and offered a polite interest, but they've never really tried
to implement anything. Or they have been constitutionally, procedurally unable to implement things, even if they wanted to. Like, in Germany, the slim state debate raged for about seven or eight years, but actually didn't do very much, because they couldn't. The federal government remained
very, very stable and similar, because it would have required, very difficult legislative processes to change it. So we're a member of, well first of all we're a member of a club of enthusiasts about management change. And secondly, we're probably the most.. We're the outlying member of that club. We have certain things that encourage management reform. Or I should say, repetitive management reform. We have those things to a greater degree, than anybody else. First of all, we're law-lite, We don't have a constitution that, restrains prime ministers, who want to make changes to the machinery of government, very much at all. The actual legal procedures, are extremely light and easy. And as long as you have a majority
in the House of Commons, and you probably don't even need that. I've told academics
and civil servants from other countries that the whole of the next steps programme, of agency creation from 1988 to the late 1990s that shifted at one point nearly 70%
of the non-industrial civil service, out of ministries, into agencies or out of something,
including ministries, into agencies. The whole of that programme, was carried through with basically no new legislation. They can't believe it. But surely you have to have
a new statute when you create you know, the prisons agency, or the driving and vehicles licensing agency. No you don't. You don't. So it's a highly centralised, majoritarian systems, so.. What the prime minister decides, usually goes. for management reform. And it's a toothless legislature. Apologies to parliamentarians among you. But as far as management reform is concerned it's an absolutely toothless legislature. And believe me,
I've sat in the libraries in the old days you actually had libraries
with copies of Hansard in. And I've gone through the very few commons and lords debates that there have been, on management reform, and they are feeble in the extreme. Some very good points made by individual speakers. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't stop anybody for one minute. So my conclusion is, we have a lot of management reform,
because it's so easy. If you are a prime minister and you want to use it for symbolic purposes, for a little exercise of rhetoric, to show you're in charge. To show you're doing something. Or maybe there's been a crises or a scandal,
so let's reorganise. It's as easy as pie. This is the easiest country in the world, to make those sorts of changes in. As far as I know. Somebody will now stop to talk to me about, how easy it is in Bogotá or something but, as far as I know it's [indistiguishable]
as this country in the world. So. Some reflections. I think, behind this process, I would not assume, that the motives for reform have remained absolutely constant over the 40 year period. I think there has been some shift. The way I would describe the shift, is as follows.. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we were just coming
to the end of a period in which machinery of government changes were really
rather dry and dusty things. They were not things for
popular public debate, or making big claims, or anything. They were just the government, adjusting its own administrative machinery. And you had, a little machinery
of government secretariat, in the treasury, or the civil service department. And occasionally,
you had to make machinery changes because bits of Whitehall
were working very badly together. Occasionally, you wanted to make changes because because you had an awkward minister who needed a bigger department. The famous case of Richard Crossman, leading to the creation, of the department of health and social security. Because, either health OR
social security would have been too small, for a minister of his eminence at that time. Things like that. Sometime during the 80s and 90s however, public management reform
became something rather different. It became a more programmatic, and a more international thing. It became, like a kind of stage, on which you strutted to show
that you were modern and progressive and that you knew, what the latest tools and processes were. Or even, in some cases,
that you had invented them. And, public management reform in a number of countries, not just the UK, has now become a policy sector in its own right. People like Michael Barzelay
have written about this at some length. So that it would be strange, for a party
that thought it might be in government, after an election, nowadays, not to have some kind of programme
of public management reform. Somehow, from somewhere,
we've acquired the assumption, "Yes. Of course. But what will you do about public management reform. If you get power?". "Well, we'll do this..". That wasn't, really.. It certainly wasn't there in the 1950s. Maybe Harold Wilson had a bit of it in 1964. but if you go back,
that's not normally part of manifestos. Very little was usually said. To put it another way,
public management reform has become both an ideology and a business. A large scale, international business with its own networks and communities, that benefits considerably from this unceasing process of reform. According to the national audit office
for example in the financial year 2003/2004, how much do you think
this central government spent on management consultants, looking at the machinery of government? Answer. Just over two billion pounds. In one financial year. The national audit office also discovered
the interesting fact that the, rising and falling of, expenditure on management consultants, almost, exactly, mirrored the private sector, corporate spending on management consultants,
so when, private sector spending went down, because there was an economic recession,
or something, public spending went up. so the big management consultancies were able to maintain a fairly steady flow of income, it just came from public sources instead of
private sources sometimes. And people like Saint-Martin, "Saint-Martin" (French accent), I should say, I think, and others have, have written about, the nature of this emerging international community, and its links with management consultancies, OECD, World Bank, and various other intergovernmental organisations. Can this situation that I've described, if you believe it, can it change? Well, yes. I think a number of conditions might lead to its decay or even disappearance. First of all regular coalition governments might make it a bit more difficult doing a kind of unilateral, structural changes that have been the norm, for the last generation. We'll see. Some political scientists, as you know, think that we're likely to get coalitions, fairly regularly, in future. Others don't think that at all. So we'll have to wait and see. But that could blunt it. Growing public cynicism might reduce the symbolic, short-term gains of announcing, yet another reform. I'm sort of a little bit doubtful about that mechanism myself because I think, on the whole, it washes over the public even if they see any information about it at all. It's not headlines in The Sun, It doesn't usually get on the television news, or if it does, it's not the first item. And I guess most people have been taking it
with a pinch of salt for quite a long time anyway. The white papers are directed at parliament, but parliament has no role in this process. This is a very strange sort of process. The whole process is bizarre to me. Governments could pass,
some kind of self-denying ordinance. They could say, "OK in future we will only change
the machinery of government.." "..only change departments who introduce major management reforms.." "..in statutory form" Or "We will never do it without introducing.." "..a costing" like you have on any other kind of bill how much will this cost? And, without specifying targets, and without having it audited each year for the next five years they could do something like that I see no sign of them doing it. It would be a rather unusual piece of
government action to make things more difficult for themselves without there being a strong reason for it. So on the whole, my hunch, and it's no more than that, is that, in the near future the probability of major change, in this particular area of, central government management reform is quite low. The current situation, the situation that has been going on for,
more or less, four decades, seems to me likely to go on for a little bit longer. And so finally, it's not much of a joke, but I'll say it anyway.. Promises continue to be plentiful, even if they're not cheap. Thank you. APPLAUSE
