Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands by Edward C. Page and Bill Jenkins
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00668.x |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| Author | Alan Trench |
REVIEWS
EdwardC. Pageand BillJenkins, Policy Bureaucracy: Government witha Cast of
Thousands,214ppþxxvi, hb d45.00, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
Accounts abound of how policy i s made by and within government, attempting
to explain the relationship between politiciansand civil servants.The commonest
view emphasises the importance of political direction and civil service hierarchy,
with politicians providing overall direction and taking key decisions, on the
advice of senior o⁄cials who may exercise some in£uence in the interstices of
political guidance, and more junior o⁄cials delivering what their masters have
determined and ¢lling in the details. A partial counter to this was popularised
by the television seriesYe s M i n i s t e r , suggestingthat the civil service is a Machiavel-
lian organisation whose higher ranks manipulate their innocent political‘masters’
into following the schemes of o⁄cialdom. Both views concur that only the most
senior ranks of the civil service count; only the top o⁄cials in any sense‘make’
policy. The problemwith such accounts is that they bear little colourable resem-
blance to the realities of government, where chance and happenstance can play
major roles, and bureaucratic organisation does not work in the same way as the
organisation chart says it does.
This is readily apparent to anyone who has worked in or around government,
but has only slowly entered the academic literature. There are exceptions; inThe
Executive in the Constitution,
1
Terry Daintith and Alan Page mounted a forensic
examination of the traditional legalconception of the role andworking of central
government. In his recent work Ed Page ofthe London School of Economics has
similarly examined how government really works. This started with the routine
legal tool of the statutory instrume nt, and a study that considered how such
instrumentscame to be madeand why the SI (rather than some other mechanism)
was use d.
2
A subsequent paper has examined the work done by bill teams work-
ing on Government legislation before it reaches Parl iament ^ the roles they
played, the considerations they hadto address and howthey dealt with thosecon-
siderations.
3
With this book, Page and Jenkins round out a view of how British
government works in practice by looking at civil servants in the middle ranks of
the civil service, and their role in making policy. By looking at less high-pro¢le
matters, they have provided a much more rounded and complete view than any-
one has yet.
1 Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,1999.
2 E.C. PageGoverningby Numbers(Oxford: Hart Publish ing,20 02).Reviewed in this journal invol 66
no.3, May 2003.
3 E. C. Page‘The Civil Servant as Legislator: Law making in British administration’. Public Adminis-
tration, vol 81no 4 (2003),pp 651^79.
r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2007) 70(5)MLR 872^886
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