Executive Agency

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An Executive Agency is a part of a government department that is treated as managerially and budgetarily separate in order to carry out some part of the executive functions of the United Kingdom government, Scottish Executive, Welsh Assembly and Northern Ireland Executive. The political aim underpinning the use of such agencies has been to distance ministers and the policy divisions of their departments from responsibility for day-to-day policy delivery but it is important to understand the fundamental differences between these "machinery of government" devices and both non-ministerial government departments, on the one hand, and non-departmental public bodies (or "quangos"), on the other, each of which enjoy a real legal and constitutional separation from ministerial control.

Despite having no legal status of their own and no constitutional separation from their departments (executive agencies are, in essence, dressed up divisions entirely reliant on their ministers for their powers to act and contract) a lot of effort and public money is devoted to creating the impression of separation, of guided autonomy and direct accountability, while in reality departments are required by HM Treasury to maintain tight controls over every aspect of an agency's business via budgetary controls, service level agreements, business plans, general and specific directions and other organisational devices. As the staff of executive agencies are civil servants and each department maintains a "sponsor unit" to oversee, negotiate with and monitor each of its agencies, staffed by civil servants, it does not require much competence with figures to appreciate that agencies are an expensive way of letting ministers off the very hook they were appointed to the UK's executive to be on. However, and despite all the individual instances of appalling and costly failure, a lot of effort has been put into presenting executive agencies as a modernising success.

As of July 2002, there were 127 Executive Agencies. 92 of these report to Departments within UK central Government. The remaining 35 report to the Scottish Executive, Welsh Assembly or Northern Ireland Executive.

Contents

Agencies range from Her Majesty's Prison Service to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. The largest agency in terms of staff numbers is Jobcentre Plus, employing 100,000 people. The annual budget for each agency, allocated by Her Majesty's Treasury ranges from a few million pounds for the smallest agencies to £700m for the Court Service to £4bn for Jobcentre Plus. Virtually all government departments have at least one agency. The Ministry of Defence has 36, the most of any department.

The agencies model of government was introduced to the UK in 1988 following the publication of Improving management in Government, a report by Sir Robin Ibbs, Efficiency Adviser to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The report heavily criticised the centralized Civil Service management of public services, saying that too much work was done on policy and too little on delivery, that there was a shortage of management skills in government and that there was a focus on short-term rather than long-term goals. The chief recommendation of the report was to set up Executive Agencies, each headed by a Chief Executive, that would concentrate solely on delivery of policy rather than policy itself. The first agency, the Vehicle Inspectorate, was established in August 1988.

The initial success or otherwise of Executive Agencies was examined in the Sir Angus Fraser's Fraser Report of 1991. Its main goal was to identify what good practices had emerged from the new model and spread them to other agencies and departments. The report also recommended further powers be devolved from ministers to chief executives.

A whole series of reports and White Papers examining governmental delivery were published throughout the 1990s, under both Conservative and Labour governments. During these the agency model became the standard model for delivering public services in the United Kingdom. By 1997 76% of civil servants were employed by an agency. The new Labour government in its first such report – the 1998 Next Steps Report endorsed the model introduced by its predecessor. The most recent review (in 2002, linked below) made two central conclusions (their emphasis):

"The agency model has been a success. Since 1988 agencies have transformed the landscape of government and the responsive and effectives of services delivered by Government."
"Some agencies have, however, become disconnected from their departments ... The gulf between policy and delivery is considered by most to have widened."

The latter point, is usually made more forcibly by Government critics, describing agencies as "unaccountable QUANGOs" [1]

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