Letting go and holding on: The politics of performance management in the United Kingdom
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076715615186 |
| Author | Felicity M Matthews |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Public Policy and Administration
2016, Vol. 31(4) 303–323
! The Author(s) 2015
Letting go and holding
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on: The politics of
DOI: 10.1177/0952076715615186
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performance
management in the
United Kingdom
Felicity M Matthews
Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
This article analyses the politics of performance management in the United Kingdom,
focusing on the extent to which a highly centralised Westminster majoritarian polity has
encouraged the top-down control of public services. It does so by comparing the
approaches
to
performance
management
that
prevailed
under
the
Labour
Governments (1997–2010) and the Coalition (2010–2015) to demonstrate the degree
of continuity that exists between the ostensibly divergent approaches that each sought to
develop. In particular, the article reveals that despite various promises to ‘let go’, succes-
sive governments have instead sought to ‘hold on’ to the detail of delivery, which has
resulted in a burgeoning disconnect between ‘managers’ and ‘the managed’. Presenting
the results of an extensive programme of original empirical research, this article is there-
fore of significance for theories of performance management, and illuminates the con-
nection between macro-level ‘patterns of democracy’ and meso-level ‘patterns of public
administration’.
Keywords
New institutionalism, public sector targets, administrative culture, organisational
hypocrisy, New Labour, Coalition Government
Performance management has been embraced by governments throughout the
world for a myriad of purposes including the improvement of public services;
the control of complex delivery networks; and the realisation of the economic
Corresponding author:
Felicity M Matthews, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road,
Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: f.m.matthews@sheffield.ac.uk
304
Public Policy and Administration 31(4)
and administrative efficiencies associated with New Public Management (NPM).
Reflecting its reputation as a NPM standard-bearer (e.g. Bouckaert and Halligan,
2008; Dahlstro¨m et al., 2011; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004), the United Kingdom
(UK) has been notable in its enthusiasm for the measurement of public service
performance; and it has been argued that the UK constitutes an ‘exceptional’ case
owing to the scope and scale of government-imposed performance indictors
throughout the public sector (Hood, 2007; Pollitt, 2007; see also Moran, 2003).
Such ‘British exceptionalism’ reached an apogee under the Labour Governments
(1997–2010), whose pursuit of ‘high minimum standards’ and ‘proper accountabil-
ity’ (Cm. 5570, 2002) resulted in a complex matrix of ‘targets and terror’ (Bevan
and Hood, 2006) that enabled central government to exert a stranglehold over the
detail of service delivery. Since 2010, however, an alternative narrative has
emerged, which has privileged principles such as ‘decentralisation’, ‘devolution’
and ‘localism’; and to this end, the Coalition Government (2010–2015) dismantled
at speed the layers of targetry and audit that mushroomed under Labour as part of
its pledge to ‘end the era of top-down government’ (HM Government, 2010: 11).
Nonetheless, this rhetorical commitment to the retrenchment of performance man-
agement has served to belie the persistence of a culture of centralisation; and in the
context of deep and wide-ranging spending cuts, the decision to jettison the machin-
ery of targetry can also be understood as a pragmatic attempt to obscure the
deleterious impact of these cuts upon service provision. Indeed, whilst the
Conservatives were returned to office in May 2015 with a clear manifesto pledge
to continue this decentralisation agenda through flagship policies such as the
‘northern powerhouse’, such tensions are set to loom large over the course of
this Parliament. In particular, although the Treasury has pledged to prioritise
spending ‘promoting growth and productivity, including through radical devolu-
tion of powers to local areas in England’, it has at the same time demanded that
unprotected
Whitehall
departments
(which
includes
the
Department
for
Communities and Local Government) ‘model’ savings of 25% and 40% in real
terms by 2019–2020 (Cm. 9112, 2015). As this brief overview suggests, when it
comes to the management of public sector performance, a disjuncture exists
between ‘talk’ and ‘action’; and this article therefore seeks to explain this ‘hypoc-
risy’ (Brunsson, 1989, 1993) by focusing on the competing political imperatives that
underpin the ‘logics of performance management’ (Pollitt, 2013; emphasis added)
that have proliferated over time in the UK.
Drawing on insights from the broad canon of ‘new’ institutionalism (for an over-
view see Lowndes and Roberts, 2013; Peters, 2005), this article argues that the
resources and norms associated with majoritarianism (Lijphart, 1999, 2012) have
fostered a highly centralised governing culture which in turn has encouraged the
top-down control of public services. Flowing out of this, the article argues that
despite a rhetorical commitment to ‘letting go’ (Dahlstro¨m et al., 2011), the ‘holding
on’ by successive British governments to the detail of delivery is an almost inevitable
consequence of this ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1989, 2006); and
that the persistence of target-based management-by-numbers in particular is
Matthews
305
reflective of the predominantly ‘heirarchist setting’ of Westminster government
(Hood, 1999, 2012). To substantiate this argument, the article compares the per-
formance management frameworks of the Labour Governments (1997–2010) and
the Coalition Government (2010–2015) to reveal the degree of continuity that exists
between these ostensibly divergent approaches. It presents the findings of an ongoing
programme of original research that has spanned the course of a decade, and rests on
what has been described as a form of ‘consilience’ (Hood and Dixon, 2010), whereby
evidence from a range of individual sources is combined to provide an exponentially
powerful evidence base. This research has therefore entailed the qualitative analysis
of key primary documents including government White Papers, ministerial speeches
and select committee inquiries. These findings have been further interrogated by a
series of over 50 interviews with past and present ministers, special advisers, civil
servants, parliamentarians, local government officials and service providers. Through
its research, this article makes an important contribution to a ‘second generation’ of
scholarship on performance management (Hood, 2012: 586), which has moved
debate beyond technical discussions regarding the construction and application of
performance numbers (e.g. Behn, 2003) to situate such tools within their wider pol-
itical and institutional context (e.g. Hood, 2007; Moynihan et al., 2011; Pollitt, 2006,
2013; Talbot, 2008). In doing so, it responds to broader criticisms regarding the
way in which the contemporary study of public administration is ‘often either
focused on the latest reform announcements and developments, or seeks to study
the performance of particular arrangements without considering the context in
which these changes are taking place’ (Lodge and Wegrich, 2012: 13). Flowing
from this, the contribution of this article is timely; and as the Conservative
Government continues to forge ahead with its programme of localism, the institu-
tional dynamics identified within are set to play a critical role over the course of the
2015–2020 parliament.
The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. It commences by providing a
synopsis of this ‘second generation’ literature in order to contrast the appeal of
performance management with the unintended consequences in which it can result.
A key theme emerging from this literature is overarching effect of ‘context’ on the
forms of measurement adopted and their subsequent implementation. In order to
explore this relationship, this section then draws upon the broad insights of ‘new’
institutionalism to explain the persistence of certain ‘logics of performance man-
agement’, despite rhetoric to the contrary. The article then moves from theory to
empirics, and the second section analyses the Labour Governments’ approach to
performance management, setting out the range of reporting mechanisms that
together constituted a system of ‘governance-by-numbers’. The third section
builds on this analysis by examining the logic of the Coalition’s localism agenda,
and the extent to which the rhetoric of decentralisation was accompanied by a
relaxation of reporting criteria. The article concludes by considering the degree
of continuity between the two performance regimes, and the implications of the
Coalition’s experiment with performance retrenchment in the context of
Westminster majoritarianism.
306
Public Policy and Administration 31(4)
Governance-by-numbers and logics of performance
management
Described as one of the ‘most widespread international trends in public manage-
ment’ (Pollitt, 2006: 25), countries throughout the world have embraced perform-
ance management to deliver a range of policy or ideological benefits, symbolic
benefits or direct electoral benefits (Hood and Dixon, 2010; see also Behn, 2003;
James and Wilson, 2010). Indeed, performance management has been described as
‘among the most important tools by which governments structure relationships,
state values, and allocate resources with employees, third-party...
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