Summary :
This book attempts to bring together and discuss different principles, ideas and nostrums that are used in the description of policy-making and administration in Britain. These include collective responsibility, individual ministerial responsibility, arm’s-length control, organisation by function, judicial review of administration. Together these ideas represent a large part of the apparatus that a graduate in administration might be expected to have accumulated. The problem for those advancing these concepts – usually teachers – and those receiving them – usually students – is that there is a massive disjunction in what should be the unity of theory and the elements of practice. Arguably we are attempting analysis in an inappropriate language. If the usual tool-kit of terms did not already exist, and if we were starting an account of British policymaking without an encumbrance of intellectual baggage, would we really find it helpful to use as starting positions labels such as Cabinet Government? Would we really start descriptions of what happens when things go wrong in Government by explaining what should happen if Ministers really believed in a Back To Basics version of Ministerial Responsibility?

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