Book Review: Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, A Government That Worked Better and Cost Less? Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government

Although this book was published in 2015 and contains no statistics from later than 2010, it remains the only careful and evidence-based analysis of the quality of performance data and the running costs of government after three decades of New Public Management (NPM) reform in the U.K. The first of the book’s nine chapters reviews the 30 years of NPM reforms since Margaret Thatcher’s premiership of the U.K. and proposes the major question to be addressed in the book: whether the managerial turn of recent governments has delivered effective policies, saved administrative costs and improved service quality. Chapter 2 introduces the political, economic and social context of the NPM reforms, and identifies the changes that have occurred since: the growth in the number of elected politicians and senior civil servants; fall in the overall size of the civil service; reduced autonomy of local authorities; privatization of public utilities, key industries and public service provision; weakening civil service bargain; and increased use of information technology. Chapter 3 discusses how the problem of discontinuities in performance data, a manifestation of incentives, structures and politics, prevents meaningful evaluation of the reforms’ effects on the cost-effectiveness of government programs over time. Chapter 4 demonstrates that although the running costs in terms of civil service pay have not increased substantially despite the reforms, there has been an increase in non-staff running costs, including those of contracting-out and consultancy. Chapter 5 is a case study of the effects of organizational mergers and IT adoption on the cost performance of the central tax collection department. The analysis concludes that complex tax reforms (e.g. tax credits) have increased the running costs, while IT adoption has done little to reduce them. Chapter 6 measures the quality of administrative services after the reforms using the metric of formal complaints and legal challenges. The authors convincingly argue that the increased number of complaints received by the Parliamentary Ombudsman and Health Service Commissioner partly indicates the declining satisfaction with administrative quality in the 1990s and 2000s. Likewise, the increased number of judicial review applications partly indicates that the government has not been perceived to work better. Chapter 7 finds that the U.K. central government’s performance can be ranked around the middle according to several cross-country studies. Meanwhile, the effects of “agencification” on reducing departmental running costs have been small and indeed lasted only a few years before the costs increased sharply again in the late 2000s; there have also been increases in the number of Ombudsman complaints regarding the U.K. central government, the English local government and the Scottish government. Previous reviews of the book have provided perspectives from British and European scholars. However, the global diffusion of NPM reforms makes it imperative for scholars and policymakers in areas very different from the U.K. and Europe, including mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, to learn the lessons contained in the book. We highlight the following particularly important lessons: