Since 1979 Conservative administrations have reformed the government for the recovers of economy in England. In 1982, the Thatcher government established the Financial Management Initiative for the efficiency of government works. The FMI was intended ...
Since 1979 Conservative administrations have reformed the government for the recovers of economy in England. In 1982, the Thatcher government established the Financial Management Initiative for the efficiency of government works. The FMI was intended to promote better information and management in government. As a result each department was obliged to implement a management system which would ensure that they had the information to access the mechanisms for achieving their objectives. Although the FMI clearly indicated a major change in the culture of whitehall, the impact was limited by the traditional departmental structure of central government. Consequently, in 1987 the government produced the Next Steps which allows for a real delegation of financial and management authority.
The Next Steps programme produced a division in departments between those who are policy advisers and makes at the core of a department, and those concerned with service delivery. This proposal would effectively dismantle the apparently monolithic and unified civil service established in the nineteenth century and develop a model where a loose federation of many smaller agencies, units and cores predominants.
The FMI and the Next Steps needs to be considered in the context of the new economic policy to make government competitive and government's strategies to revise public management. And also these effort need to be considered to be a device of creating new bureaucratic culture which can be adapted to a new environmental change.
However, there were some problems in the operation of the FMI and the Next Steps such as accountabilities between the minister and the chief of agencies or problems of autonomies which the agenies have to achieve their objectives. And through the such problems we must recognize the fact the civil-service reform can be achieved by not only institutional change but also the management of human resources, the promotion of manager's self-fulfilment, and cultural changes.