Research On Central Government’s Policy-Making And Executive Systems In The United Kingdom

Policy making at central governmental level in the United Kingdom is dominated by the core executive, which is a complex network existing on the top of the central government. It contains the key institutions and actors with separate roles as well as strong inter-dependent and coordianting relationships. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet are the top policy makers acting in accordance with constitutional conventions rather than statutes. Usually statutes confer governmental functions on individual ministers but not the entire departments. Ministers decide policies concerning the business falling within their respective areas, and participate in cabinet to collectivelly decide major policies for the government. Business concerning different departments or conflicts between departments must be referred to cabinet for decision. The Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office, cabinet committees and Treasury play important coordinating roles in the policy process. In recent years, however, with the evolution of multi-level governance, powers of the core executive have increasingly shifted upwards to international and European arean, and downwards to devolved administrations, local governments, agencies, quangos, and etc., indicating a clear trend of decentralization. In addition, the British government has developed an extensive advisory system for policy making, including those within the government such as special advisors, senior civil service, adisory non-departmental public bodies, and outside of the government such as think tanks. These advisors are useful in bringing expert opinion into the government’s policy making. Comprehensive social participation in policy process by pressure groups and mass media also helps to take public opinion into account in policy making and fast respond to the demand of the society.In 1988, Mrs. Thatcher launched the Next Steps Initiative to hive off executive functions from the departments and conferred it upon the newly created executive agencies, while the policy making remained with the core departments. Executive agencies are semi-autonomous organizations and remain as parts of their departments without formal legal status. Led by a Chief Executive, executive agency operates within the policy and resource framework set by its parent department, and enjoys some autonomy in management, personnal and finance. But parent departments still remain control over executive agencies by developing framework documents, appointing chief executives, setting financial and performance targets, and etc. Chief Executives are personally accountable to ministers for operational performance, and ministers are accountable ultimately to the Parliament for the executive agencies’ performance. The rise of executive agencies brought a managerial revolution to the British central government, not only by reshaping the structure of the central government but also by changing the traditional management methods and culture. Executive agencies today continue to be the principal service delivery agents for the central government.In addition to executive agencies, there are a variety of semi-autonomous public bodies carrying out service delivery for central government, among them the most important are executive non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs). The main difference between executive agencies and executive NDPBs is that executive NDPBs usually are created by statutes with formal legal status and more independent from the control of ministers. After the Next Steps Initiative, the government extended some governing measures used in executive agencies to executive NDPBs, which resulted in narrower difference between them.In general, the system of separation of executive functions performed by specialized executive bodies from policy making controlled by core departments has helped focus attention on the organizations’ core business, and ensure the quality of policy making and executive activities. Specialization and independent status of executive bodies can help remove political intervention in executive activities, increase managerial autonomy, bring external expertise and skills into government, and increase the interaction between government and society. The British experience, however, also reveals possible difficulties caused by this system. The first is fragment resulted by individual executive bodies, and turf-wars between agencies with overlapping responsibilities, which indicate the importance of coordinating mechanism in government’s operation and the concept of joint-up government. The second is how to establish and balance the relationship of independence and control between the executive bodies and the policy makers. In UK, the departments found it difficult to adopt an adult or strategic relationship with their executive bodies, often either resorting to authoritarian over-controlling micromanagement, or a hands-off approach. The third is how to allocate the accountability between the executive bodies and policy makers. In UK, the constitutional convention of ministerial responsibility developed to control the policy makers is frequently frustrated in reality, while the separation of policy making and executive functions also provides ministers with another execuse to refuse taking accountability for operational problems. Consequently, it is suggested that more legislation should be enacted by Parliament to make the creation of executive bodies more difficult, and set up a clear, unified and transparent governing framework for executive bodies. These all may provide some enlightenment for the administrative reform in China.