Tony Travers

This article describes the centralised nature of the UK, briefly describes the changes now under way in Scotland and Wales and then analyses differences in output per head as between nations and regions. It then considers the scope for devolution, including fiscal devolution within England. The United Kingdom today is one of the most fiscally-centralised of all OECD countries, but there will soon be reform in Scotland and Wales, with significant devolution of tax-raising powers to Edinburgh and Cardiff. In England, there is currently no ‘state’ or ‘regional’ tier of government. There have been significant differences in GDP/GVA per head of the nations and regions of the UK for many decades. Efforts to ‘rebalance’ the GDP/GVA totals shown above have involved public expenditure and investment programmes over several decades. The results of the UK's centralised distribution of resources, if any, on changes in regional and sub-regional performance are little studied. A highly-centralised system of taxation and public expenditure is not, it would appear, a guarantee of territorial economic equalisation. In a potentially radical policy departure, George Osborne has moved further than any minister in recent times towards a form of city-regional devolution within England. In the first instance, any devolved power is likely to be over public expenditure, though in the longer term fiscal devolution may become possible. The move towards a quasi-federal UK is now well under way.

Transport has been a dominant political and public funding issue in London for decades. The growth of the city's economy and population has created demands for new and improved services and to reduce congestion. Proposals have been made to build new railway and underground lines, though the process of delivering them has proved problematic and slow. Existing transport infrastructure has not been properly maintained. Governance arrangements have been reformed from time to time. The city must operate within the UK's centralized public finance model, which ensures a need for multi-level government decision-making. London cannot use the product of local taxation to re-invest in its own transport system. Consequently, there is only a weak, inconsistent, and under-researched approach to the delivery of such transport investment.

This paper traces the origins and charts the development and reform of the Metropolitan Police Service since its inception in 1829. It explores how the growing complexity of London's government, accentuated by the creation of the Greater London Council in 1965, reopened the debate for local government control of the metropolitan police. Not until the creation of the Greater London Authority in 2000, however, were changes in accountability of the Metropolitan Police finally put in place with the creation of the Metropolitan Police Authority as a functional body of the GLA. The paper reviews the working of this relationship over the past five years and considers the MPA's role in securing accountability.

The authors examine two main research issues. First, they focus on the way in which funds for education are targeted on disadvantage at the level of the local education authority (LEA). They explore the relationship between various indicators of disadvantage and national test and public examination results and find that the relationship between one measure of disadvantage—the proportion of children dependent on Income Support recipients in an LEA—has a stronger negative relationship with examination results of that LEA than the additional educational needs (AEN) index currently used by central government in the formula to distribute resources to local authorities. Second, the authors focus on the relationship between expenditure and performance and find evidence that higher expenditure by LEAs on education is associated with better examination results once poverty (as measured by the Income Support measure) has been controlled for. The first finding suggests that targeting educational need could be improved by substituting the Income Support measure for the current AEN index; the second lends support to the use of increased expenditure as a means of combating educational disadvantage.

Examines regulation of prison standards by arms‐length oversight bodies, which generally had much stronger capacities for monitoring than enforcement. Prisons in England and Wales are subject to one of the densest patterns of oversight of any public sector activity. There has been a tendency to add new layers of regulation at various times without taking anything away, creating considerable overlap and duplication. Regulators who lacked formal powers were nevertheless observed to develop less formal mechanisms for seeking modification of behaviour.

Examines the practices of regulation over central government. It starts from the observation that control based on mutuality has traditionally been of central importance and assesses the extent to which recent initiatives have been introduced more by way of oversight, and control through competition and contrived randomness. The chapter concludes that though the Whitehall has not been so sharply affected by processes of re‐regulation as other sectors examined in the study, such as schools and prisons, nonetheless it has not been immune from such reforms.

Explores three interrelated themes: the tools and approaches regulators used to do their job; the extent to which regulation of government resembled regulation of business; and the extent to which regulatory behaviour and style were linked to the relational distance between the regulators and those they regulate. It argues that while there is no single style of regulation in government, the tools and approaches used by the regulators cut across the different institutional forms taken by the regulators.

Regulation Inside Government analyses the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance‐chasers, standard‐setters, and other bodies overseeing contemporary public organizations. On the basis of a pioneering two‐year inside study of British Government by a team of leading scholars, this book provides an original analytical perspective on regulation within government. Given the limitations of orthodox constitutional checks on executive government, the courts, and elected politicians, regulation inside government deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. As one of the first comprehensive accounts of regulation inside government, this book begins to fill the gap. The empirical data for the study sets out the full range of modes of control applied to the public sector. The authors examine the relationship between formal oversight, of the traditional regulatory sort, with other forms of control based on competition, mutuality, and contrived randomness. They conclude that there is a failure in contemporary public management to deploy each of these modes of control to their full potential.

The quality of life in London is commonly assumed to be relatively poor and to have been substantially damaged by the abolition of the GLC. The authors examine whether London really has serious problems and whether the new system of local government has affected conditions.