The British Civil Service Perspectives on ‘Decline’ and ‘Modernisation’.pdf

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2010.00431.x BJPIR: 2011 VOL 13, 189–205 The British Civil Service: Perspectives on bjpi_431 189..205 ‘Decline’ and ‘Modernisation’ Robert Pyper and June Burnham This article was stimulated by the contradiction between two predominant characterisations of the British civil service. Some analysts see it as in decline, possibly terminally, overwhelmed by the challenges posed by the reforms and the changes in its policy environment; others see it as in the vanguard by adopting modernising reforms and adapting to new public service values. After critically examining these opposing perspectives on civil service ‘decline’ and ‘modernisation’, we conclude that these contrasting analyses suffer from adopting too limited a view of the British civil service in its historical and international context. The British civil service has during its long history progressively modernised and in a progressive way—becoming less corrupt, more accountable, more pluralist, more responsive to citizens’ needs—often sceptical about reform, but nevertheless moving with the times. Keywords: civil service; modernisation; Whitehall; reform Introduction Students of politics and public management encounter conflicting assessments of the British civil service. On the one hand, international bodies and textbooks regularly locate it in the vanguard of reform, introducing changes that others follow (Dunleavy 1994; OECD 1995; Hughes 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). This image derived from the administrative policies of ‘New Right’ governments in the 1980s, whose intellectual significance was enhanced by early British research on the ‘new public management’ (NPM) (such as Pollitt 1990; Dunleavy 1991; Hood 1991). The arrival in power of ‘New