1. law, govt and politics
2. government

Prisons and
How to Get Rid
of Them
may envisage further contraction, possibly
abolition. This would be congruent with the
whole weight of evidence on
prisons…anything else is tantamount to
acceding towards irrationality.
An Exploding Population
David Wilson
Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and
Practice, UCE in Birmingham
Let me start by quoting from two
different sources—both from work
published in 1990. The first is from
a book by the Labour peer Baroness
Blackstone:
Britain has a disastrously expensive and
inhumane penal system, which is
compounded by a huge injection of
resources into building more prisons.
Placing so much emphasis on building
prisons is a sad reflection on the
innovative abilities of the government. A
little more imagination, rather more
attention to the evidence in front of
them, and greater political courage
would have led ministers down a quite
different path. It would have led them to
a sustained effort to reduce substantially
the prison population.
Baroness Blackstone ended her
book with a demand that the prison
population be cut by half—to
around 24,000 people.
The second quotation comes
from the Norwegian criminologist
Thomas Mathiesen. Mathiesen
optimistically predicts that reason
will eventually persuade policymakers that prison is illogical:
Victim work and offender work will certainly
prove more satisfactory than prison, and we
This article is based on a lecture
Professor Wilson gave in February 2006
to the PMPA on the Case for Penal
Abolition in England and Wales. The
lecture was held in London and was
chaired by Frances Crook, Director of the
Howard League for Penal Reform.
2
From our vantage point some 15
years after these statements were
made, we can see that New Labour
has presided over unparalleled
growth in the penal system. Rather
than the prison population falling
by 24,000 since the government
came to power in 1997, there are an
extra 30,000 people behind bars.
We now have now more life
sentenced prisoners in Britain than
the whole of Western Europe
combined; New Labour has
presided over more penal
privatization than the sum total of
their Tory predecessors, despite
Tony Blair claiming in 1993 that
Labour opposed prison
privatization; and we have our
current Chief Inspector of Prisons
echoing all of her predecessors
about how awful the experience of
incarceration actually is in this
country.
No-one, it would seem, would
currently agree with Mathiesen that
there might come a day when
contraction and eventual abolition
of prison is possible, and that to do
otherwise is ‘irrational’.
Current justifications of prison
suggest that ‘prison works’ by
incapacitation—it takes people out
of society and thus gives
communities a rest from those who
have broken the law; through
individual and general deterrence—
it makes those who might be
thinking about committing a crime
think again; by punishing those
who do actually commit crimes;
and, finally, by rehabilitating—it
helps those who have committed
crimes to think through the causes
of their offending so as to change
their behaviour by developing new
skills, which they are then able to
put to good use on release from
custody. These justifications are
now so widespread that few people
bother to question whether they are
actually true or not and the one
place that we can forget about
‘evidence-led practice’ in relation to
public policy is when prisons are
discussed.
It would be easy to unmask these
false justifications by patiently
pointing out the realities about who
gets imprisoned and who does not;
the relationship—or otherwise—
between the crime rate and the rate
of imprisonment; what happens to
people when they are inside and
especially what happens to them
after they are released. We’d point
to the fact that four out of every five
young offenders are reconvicted
within two years of leaving jail; that
one out of every two adult men are
similarly reconvicted; and that just
under one out of every two women
suffer the same fate.
Would a school that failed to
teach two out of every three of its
pupils to read and write, or a
hospital that killed one out of every
two of its patients continue to
receive widespread political and
popular support?
Prison fails by almost every
measure that it sets for itself. It is a
useless, outdated, bloated Victorian
institution that is well past its sell-by
date; or to quote a former Tory
minister, ‘an expensive way of
making bad people worse’.
How, then, do we create a
scepticism about what prison was,
now is and what is claimed for it by
its supporters?
Creating a Road Map to
Decarceration
What has been absent from the
debate to date is a solid ‘road map’
of how we get from where we are to
where I think we should be. I have
been attempting to create a road
map for some time, most recently in
my book—Death at the Hands of the
State. My starting point for my road
map is to look at historical examples
of decarceration. A particularly
interesting example from England
Review No. 33
and Wales was the decline in the
prison population between 1908
and 1939 from 22,029 to 11,086—
or in terms of the numbers of
prisoners per 100,000 of the general
population from 63 to 30
(Rutherford, 1988). In effect, prison
numbers halved and, as a result,
around 20 prisons had to close down
despite the fact that the crime rate in
this period actually increased by
around 100%.
How can this phenomenon be
explained? I think that we have to
consider three issues:
•For decarceration to have begun to
this extent there had to have been
a great deal of scepticism about
what prison and imprisonment
could do, and that scepticism was
shared by a wide range of people
who were able to exercise
influence over the political
process—an echo perhaps of what
Mathiesen from our own day has
described as creating ‘alternative
public space’.
•There was a credible, practical
alternative to incarceration.
•Prisons and prison staff responded
to this changing sensibility, both
prompting and supporting the
drop in prison numbers.
Scepticism
In relation to the first of these three
points, one of the realities that
characterizes this historical period is
that several politicians and several
key social groups became absolutely
convinced that prison was a
corrupting and counter-productive
experience. The most obvious
example to give is Winston Churchill,
who as Home Secretary between
February 1910 and October 1911, set
about reducing the use of
imprisonment, especially for those
who had hitherto been sentenced to
very short sentences. He noted, for
example, that in 1910 some twothirds of sentenced prisoners had
received sentences of two weeks or
less, and he described this as ‘a
terrible and purposeless waste of
May 2006
public money and human character’.
More famously, in July 1910 he also
suggested that ‘the mood and temper
of the public to the treatment of
crime and criminals is one of the
most unfailing tests of the civilization
of the country’. Just why Churchill
was so against prison is a matter of
conjecture, but perhaps we can trace
his antipathy back to his own
experience as a prisoner of war
during the Boer War, and it is worth
noting that those politicians who have
had direct experiences of
incarceration—such as Nelson
Mandela and the Czech President
Vaclav Havel—are usually the most
ardent penal reformers when they
come to power.
Churchill’s scepticism was
mirrored in this period by other key
and influential groups and
commentators, who created the
right ‘mood music’ for
decarceration to take place. For
example, Oscar Wilde was arrested
in 1895 on charges of gross
indecency and sent to gaol for two
years. While inside he wrote The
Ballad of Reading Gaol which had a
tremendous popular impact when it
was first published in 1898 and
remains, as far as I am concerned,
one of the best pieces of prison
writing that this country has ever
produced. Similarly, just prior to
the First World War the
incarceration of suffragettes and
their treatment inside, and
thereafter the imprisonment of
conscientious objectors, created two
powerful groups of people who were
prepared to campaign for changes in
relation to imprisonment. The most
obvious example to give is the
formation of the Howard League for
Penal Reform in 1921, and two of the
conscientious objectors who had been
imprisoned—Stephen Hobhouse and
Fenner Brockway conclude in their
book about prisons, published in
1921 that:
Our prison system, whilst it sometimes
makes good prisoners, does almost nothing
to make good citizens. It fails to restore
the weak will or to encourage initiative;
it reduces energy by the harshness of its
routine and adds depression to the
depressed…and the more the system costs
the country, the more highly it is
organized, the more monumental must
that failure be.
The Alternative to Incarceration
The second development that I
believe creates the preconditions for
decarceration to take place in this
period is the development a
credible alternative to incarceration.
Specifically it is during this period
that we see the development of
probation. The roots of probation
stem from the 1876 and the Church
of England Temperance Society. In
1907 the government had passed its
first Probation Act giving probation
a statutory footing. In short,
imprisonment is not seen as the
‘only club in the golf bag’ of policy
options when it comes to
responding to offenders, and allows
the hegemony of incarceration to be
challenged.
Responses from Government
The Home Office, prisons and
prison staff, too, responded to these
changing social and policy
developments. They were not the
passive recipients of change, but
rather both prompted and
responded to change. Their
response is perhaps best symbolized
by the Gladstone Committee of
1898 which completely re-defined
the purpose of imprisonment:
We think that the system should be made
more elastic, more capable of being
adopted to the special cases of
individual prisoners; that prison
discipline and treatment should be more
effectively designed to maintain,
stimulate, or awaken the higher
susceptibilities of prisoners, to develop
their moral instincts, to train them in
orderly and industrial habits, and
whenever possible to turn them out of
prison better men and women, both
physically and morally than when they
came in.
3
These challenges were admirably
taken up in prisons and by prison
staff through, for example, the
development of the borstal regime
for young offenders, and in relation
to the introduction of psychologists
and educationalists into prison
regimes.
Lessons for Today
What lessons can we learn from this
historical example about
decarceration in our own day? The
key lesson for me is that we have to
re-create a sense of scepticism into
the policy debate, and that scepticism
has to be robust enough to transcend
party politics, while at the same time
creative enough to engage the public
with the message that prison is costly,
counter-productive and, except in a
very few cases, in no-one’s interests.
This seems like a pipedream, but
there are various ways that this can
be achieved.
The work of the Howard League
for Penal Reform, and the Esmée
Fairbairn Foundation is essential,
but we need to go a step further
and create a space in which a
challenge to prison can be
mounted. To do this we have to be
prepared to engage with the media.
I say this because of my
involvement with the Channel 4
series Buried, on which I acted as a
consultant, and which generated
more column inches about penal
reform—and at a stroke a bigger
audience for penal reform through
the viewing public than any other
event of the past five years. Buried
exposed the still largely closed
world of prison to public scrutiny,
and presented the violence,
hopelessness, madness and
pervading sense of decay that
permeates prison for all to see. The
tragedy here is that Buried did not
get re-commissioned, despite a
public appeals on behalf of the
series by, for example, the Guardian
and the Daily Mirror. Nonetheless,
there will be other ‘Burieds’, and
the next time we should do what we
can to support the space that
4
programmes like this create, for it is
that space which allows a challenge
to imprisonment to take hold in an
audience that does not normally
think too much about prison or
prisoners. Above all, and while now
is not the time to debate the media’s
use and misuse of prisoners and
imprisonment, Buried created that
space because it seemed ‘real’; it
seemed genuine, rather than the
obvious fakery of Porridge and Bad
Girls.
But we shouldn’t just wait for
another Buried to come along—
things are too desperate for that,
and so here I want to briefly allude
to Death at the Hands of the State. The
book was consciously written with a
reductionist/abolitionist agenda,
and I had to think very carefully
about how to engage an audience
with that agenda. I didn’t want to
reproduce the same mountain of
evidence that already exists about
the irrationality of prison simply for
that evidence to be ignored yet
again. So how could an audience for
penal abolition be created? Here I
was influenced by the success of
Buried. Why had that series been a
success? What was it that sustained
its audience? Now I have written
about cinema’s use of prisons and
imprisonment before—in Images of
Incarceration (with Sean O’Sullivan),
and I don’t intend to debate this too
deeply in this article, but what
struck me about Buried was the
power of its emotional appeal to the
audience. It told believable stories
about believable people—
prisoners—who were just like you
and me, and who were worried
about those things that you and I
worry about too: families,
relationships; finding work;
surviving, consuming and simply
progressing through life. So, in
writing Death at the Hands of the State
I wanted to tell stories—emotional
stories—and infuse the argument
with a narrative based on real
people who ended up inside, or
who had family members end up
inside. More than this I used the
book to tell stories about the
scandal of the numbers of people
who die while in our penal system,
especially children—either through
having committed suicide, or
having been murdered, or dying as
a result of old age, or inadequate
health care.
I tell stories about people like
Pauline Campbell—a modern-day
suffragette. Pauline is a former
college lecturer in her late 50s, who
during 2004 was arrested over 10
times as a direct result of her own
unique protest aimed at drawing
attention to the deaths of women
prisoners in British jails. Every time
a woman died, Campbell would go
to the prison where the death had
occurred and stand in the road to
prevent any prison van from
bringing more women to that jail.
The police would be called and
Campbell would then be ordered by
them to move out of the van’s way.
She would refuse and then she
would be arrested. She describes
this as her ‘one woman, self-funding
protest’, although it was not
something that she had originally
been drawn to and Campbell is
honest enough to admit, ‘I had no
idea about the appalling state of
women’s prisons before Sarah’s
death’.
Sarah was Campbell’s only child,
who died aged 18 in January 2003
while ‘in the so-called care of HMP
[Her Majesty’s Prison] & YOI [Young
Offender Institution] Styal’. Sarah
had spent six months on remand in
2002 and on 17 January 2003 was
sentenced to a term of imprisonment
and returned to Styal. The following
day Sarah was taken unconscious to a
local hospital and died later that
evening without regaining
consciousness. Campbell says that she
protests to ‘demonstrate that prisons
are unsafe places which constantly
failed to uphold the duty of care that
the Prison Service has to all
prisoners. People must speak out. It’s
medieval’. So she held her first
demonstration outside of HMP
Brockhill, following the death of
Review No. 33
Sheena Kotecha, then outside of
HMP Holloway when Julie Hope
died and a third outside HMP New
Hall after the death of Louise Davis.
Since then the demonstrations have
kept on coming, for women in prison
are 40 times more likely to kill
themselves than women in the
community. Indeed in 2004, 12
women—a new record, took their
lives in English and Welsh jails and
so, tragically, Campbell is rarely out
of the news.
I use Pauline Campbell’s
emotional story—and many other
stories about people like her in the
book, to shamelessly connect people
with the scandal of what happens
behind our prison’s walls, and in
doing so I do not necessarily
pretend to be objective, empirical
or indeed logical. Rather, I am
emotional, partisan and passionate,
and through that passion I hope to
engage the reader with the cause of
prison contraction and abolition.
After all, prison and penal
expansionists have been very adept
at using logic and objectivity to
mask their policy goals.
Call to Arms
I want to end this article with a plea
and a challenge to the Review’s
readers, a group which includes a
number of academics. For the
alternative space that needs to be
created has also to be created by
people working in the academy. You
are not the passive recipients of that
space but, rather, have a key and
pivotal role in resisting the mass
incarceration that is currently
taking place in this country. After
all, you are ‘real’ in this debate too.
But, with the exception of a group
of committed abolitionists, such as
Joe Sim (Liverpool JMU) and Barry
Goldson (University of Liverpool) to
name but two, where has been your
voice? Where has been your
opposition?
Too often fellow criminologists—
and others, have seemed to me
intent on re-legitimizing the prison,
by describing, for example, the
May 2006
circumstances in which the prison’s
moral performance can be assessed
and then measured, or have been
satisfied at investigating the culture
and sub cultures of prisons, their
drugs economy and the like. Too
often colleagues have been
prepared to take the Home Office’s
shilling and conduct evaluations of
this or that regime or initiative, and
stay silent about the scandal that
goes on behind the prison’s walls as
more and more people are sent
inside, for having committed fewer
and less severe offences. Now that
really is a scandal—and it is also the
truth, and I want you too to be
prepared to challenge that. But the
truth can never be revealed
through silence, and if that is what
you do—stay silent, all that will
happen is that our prison
numbers will grow and grow again
and again. ■
References
Baroness Blackstone (1990), Prisons and
Penal Reform (Chatto & Windus,
London).
Mathiesen, T. (1990, reprinted 2000),
Prison on Trial (Sage, London).
Wilson, D. and O’Sullivan, S. (2004),
Images of Incarceration: Representations
of Prison in Film and Television Drama
(Waterside Press, Winchester).
Wilson, D. (2005), Death at the Hands of
the State (Howard League for Penal
Reform, London).
Writing for the PMPA Review
If you would like to submit an article for
consideration for publication in the
Review, please contact the Editor,
Michaela Lavender, PMPA, 3 Robert
Street, London WC2N 6RL; fax 001 561
218 8673; email
micky@mickylavender.com.
Prison Matters:
Reflections on
Prisons and
How to Get Rid
of Them
Robert Jupe
Kent Business School, University of Kent,
Canterbury
The Issues
Professor Wilson has produced a
trenchant, passionate and wideranging argument for prison
contraction in the UK. The key
tension in the penal policy debate
‘remains that between penal
populism on the one hand and
welfarism and penal reform on the
other’ (Nutley and Loveday, 2005, p.
264). When New Labour was elected
on a manifesto which made a
commitment to follow the principle
of ‘What counts is what works’
(Labour Party, 1997), there was an
expectation of an non-ideological
evidence-based approach to policymaking, not least in the area of
criminal justice. In practice, however,
as David Wilson points out, far from
adopting Baroness Blackstone’s
suggestion to cut the prison
population, New Labour has put
around an extra 30,000 people
behind bars. Thus it appears that
the guiding principle of criminal
justice policy for both major parties
has become Michael Howard’s
stark, but evidence-light, statement
to the 1993 Conservative Party
conference that ‘prison works’. New
Labour accordingly has been very
concerned to demonstrate that it is
‘tough on crime’ through the
increased use of the penal system,
including the expansion of the
number of private prisons, the
promotion of longer prison
sentences, and the introduction of a
wide range of new criminal justice
legislation.
5
Developing Scepticism
As Professor Wilson argues, however,
there are some positive signs that
scepticism about prisons is
developing. For example Charles
Clarke’s recent publication of a fiveyear strategy for tackling the
reoffending rate by developing
community punishments. The Home
Secretary’s statement to the House of
Commons was refreshingly honest in
its acceptance that: ‘Prison does not
work in stopping reoffending…it is
best for the most serious offenders,
particularly those who are
dangerous…there are better
punishments for others…properly
organised community sentences can
be a powerful, effective and tough
punishment that offers the best
chance of stopping offenders
offending again’ (Hansard, 2006).
This explicit repudiation of the
Howard doctrine offered at least
some hope of change, and so earned
‘two cheers’ from the Guardian (2006)
and a welcome for the policy shift
from the Prison Reform Trust.
The key problem, of course, with
the proposed development of
community punishments is the initial
investment required in order to make
the strategy effective. It is in the area
of the increasing costs of punishment
that there is surely scope for
developing scepticism about prisons
in the policy debate. Revisiting
Winston Churchill’s argument that
short prison sentences are ‘a terrible
and purposeless waste of public
money’ could prove fruitful. It costs
around £36,000 to keep a person in
prison for one year. Given the high
reoffending rates of ex-prisoners, this
appears to be very poor value for
money and certainly does not
conform with New Labour’s original
guiding principle of ‘What counts is
what works’. Since the growth in
public expenditure is likely to be
strictly constrained for the rest of the
decade, studies of the current
comparative costs of prisons and of
community punishments could
contribute to the debate by
highlighting credible costed
6
alternatives to incarceration.
Developing Opportunities for
Offenders
Further, given the limitations in what
can be achieved through public
expenditure, penal reformers and
the government ideally should have a
common interest in developing more
opportunities for offenders involving
the voluntary and business sectors. It
is, after all, entirely in keeping with
the New Labour ethos to develop
partnerships wherever possible. The
National Grid company, for example,
has pioneered business involvement
in the rehabilitation of young
offenders. It has built up
relationships with 15 prisons, and has
trained over 200 former offenders,
leading to careers with the company
or its contractors. According to the
company’s analysis, the reoffending
rate is of those taken on is only 7%
(National Grid, 2005). If substantial
numbers of major companies were
to become involved in similar
offender programmes, then
significant improvements in the
rehabilitation of both young and
adult offenders could be achieved
along with a reduction in the
numbers returning to prison after
reoffending.
Professor Wilson has produced an
impressive road map in an attempt to
stop the apparently inexorable
growth in prison numbers. It is to be
hoped that many others, both inside
and outside of government, will join
him on the journey. ■
References
Guardian (2006), Two cheers for Mr
Clarke (10 February), p. 36.
Hansard (2006), Offender management
statement by Charles Clarke, column
1033 (9 February), (London).
Labour Party (1997), New Labour: Because
Britain Deserves Better (London).
National Grid plc (2005), Young Offender
Programme (London).
Nutley, S. and Loveday, B. (2005),
Criminal justice—Tensions and
challenges. Public Money &
Management, 25, 5, pp. 263–265.
Prison: An
Inevitable
Outcome?
David Howells JP
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, Eastleigh
Those who persist in believing that
‘prison works’ should be locked up!
Shame on me, a magistrate, for even
thinking such a thing; but, from what
David Wilson tells us, the thought has
about the same level of logic and
common sense as most justifications
for prison. His view is that, ‘these
justifications are at best aspirational
and, at worst, simply lies‘.
In his PMPA lecture, David Wilson
expanded on his August 2005 PMPA
Review article, ‘Prisons—are you
thinking what I’m thinking?’ He
admits to being emotional, partisan
and passionate in his tireless
campaigning to engage others in the
case for prison contraction and
abolition. He contends that we forget
about ‘evidence-led practice’ in
relation to public policy development
when prisons are discussed. Perhaps
this is at the heart of the problem.
Those in the best position to change
or influence public opinion want to
believe that ‘prison works’ because
the alternative rational response
requires some radical, unpopular—
possibly vote-losing—changes in
policy and practice.
Custody: A Logical but Unwanted
Sentence?
So, as a magistrate, am I thinking
what David Wilson is thinking? Yes!
Am I putting (or able to put) that
thinking into practice? No, not
always. The latest guidance to
magistrates and judges is clear enough:
The views in this article are personal
opinions and are not intended to
represent the general views of
magistrates or the Magistrates’
Association.
Review No. 33
‘the court must not pass a custodial
sentence unless it is of the opinion that
the offence…was so serious that neither
a fine alone nor a community sentence
can be justified’ (Section 152(2),
Criminal Justice Act 2003).
The Criminal Justice Act 2003
gave rise to 12 distinct requirements
that might be used in any number or
combination to provide suitable and
appropriate community sentences. At
least the scope for alternatives to
prison has widened—so far, so good.
Magistrates also have sentencing
guidelines for virtually all offences.
Depending on their relative
seriousness, each offence has a
recommended ‘entry point’ (or
threshold) sentence associated with it:
for example a fine, a community
sentence, custody. The circumstances
of each case are then assessed in
terms of aggravating or mitigating
factors to determine whether the
entry point is too high or too low.
Most importantly, for the more
serious offences, magistrates will rely
heavily on the conclusions and
recommendations of a probation
officer’s report on the offender.
However, magistrates are
nevertheless working from this
baseline of sentencing guidelines and
follow a structured decision-making
process in order to try to maintain
consistency. If these base guidelines
are considered outmoded in terms of
custody thresholds, then—unless they
are changed—prison will remain a
logical and consistent option, not
necessarily a preferred one for many
magistrates and judges.
There are some practical issues
too. What do magistrates and judges
do when all obvious and reasonable
community sentence requirements
have been tried, but have failed to
work and/or the offender consistently
breaches those requirements?
Suspended prison sentences will
provide an effective threat for some,
but not for all. Adding to the cocktail
of community sentence requirements
and perhaps extending their
duration will work for some, but not
for all. Indeed, it may set offenders
May 2006
up to fail and increase the likelihood
of breaches occurring.
On top of all this, there will be
some magistrates and judges who
consciously or subconsciously take
into account what they perceive the
victim, or public opinion, or even the
media considers to be an appropriate
sentence. For many victims and
onlookers, a community sentence—
however demanding—is still
regarded as a soft option.
fines have gone out of fashion because
there is no belief that they will be enforced.
But steps are now being taken to enforce
fines and make non-custodial alternatives
more effective and I would urge
[magistrates] to investigate the efficacy of
community sentencing…and consider
carefully before deciding that there is no
alternative to a prison sentence.
Changing the Mindset
Arson! A Post-Lecture Footnote
Who is going to be brave and
committed enough to begin the
journey to change that generally held
view?
David Wilson is explicit. There has
to be a shared responsibility involving
all those able to exercise influence
over the political process. He talks
from a position of considerable
knowledge and experience. Prior to
taking up an academic appointment
as Professor of Criminology at the
Centre for Criminal Justice Policy
and Research at the University of
Central England, he was a prison
governor. He challenges fellow
criminologists for remaining silent
about the effectiveness of custodial
sentences and what really goes on
behind the prison walls. As he
concluded, ‘the truth can never be
revealed through silence…all that will
happen is that our prison numbers
will grow and grow again’.
Perhaps there are signs of some
key people being prepared to speak
out. The new president of the
Magistrates’ Association is the
recently-appointed Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth
Matravers. He has already made his
views on prison sentences well known
to magistrates. In a recent open letter
in the Magistrate, Vol. 62, No. 1
(January 2006) he said:
After the lecture I spoke to David
Wilson about the excellent work
undertaken by many fire and rescue
services to prevent young arsonists
from re-offending. In the Hampshire
Fire and Rescue Service, we believe
have in excess of a 90% success rate
in preventing re-offending. As it
happens, David is currently involved
in making a documentary film on this
very subject. So, we have helped out
by identifying a suitable fire-setter
(arsonist) and a victim of arson who
have already been interviewed and
filmed! Oh, the power of networking
at PMPA events! ■
I suspect that in some cases prison
sentences are imposed because magistrates
do not believe that a community sentence
will be properly implemented or result in
meaningful punishment. In the past, they
may have sometimes been right. Equally,
Maybe, just maybe, the journey has
really begun.
PMM Call for Papers
Governing by Outcomes—The
Experience of Outcome-Based Planning
and Budgeting in the UK and
Internationally: Public Money &
Management, Vol. 27, No. 3 (June 2007)
This special edition of PMM is being
published to coincide with the fifth
Spending Review and seeks papers
which explore all aspects of
government by outcome. The guest
editors, Colin Talbot (Manchester
Business School) and Caroline Mawhood
(NAO), are looking for both theoretical
and empirical work addressing the issues
at any level of government.
Proposals for papers (not more than
one side of A4) need to be sent to
Colin Talbot by 1 August 2006:
colin.talbot@mbs.ac.uk
7
Useless,
Outdated and
Bloated?
Richard Garside
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies,
King’s College London
Prison exercises such a powerful
ideological hold on most people’s
understanding of how crime is dealt
with that it often comes as a surprise
when prison’s relative lack of impact
is pointed out. Less than 1% of
known crime in Britain ends up with
an individual being sent to prison.
Add to this the high reconviction
rates of those leaving prison,
highlighted by David Wilson in his
lecture, and prison’s failure as a
means of dealing with crime is only
too clear.
It can also come as a surprise
when the relatively recent origins of
prison are pointed out. Most societies
in most periods of history have at
times resorted to containing certain
individuals for a range of reasons.
But the use of prison as means of
punishment for crime, at least in a
society such as Britain, is relatively
recent. For most of Britain’s history
prison has not been used to punish
criminals, nor as a means of
achieving and maintaining social
order.
To assume that prisons should and
will be a perennial feature of British
society is therefore to demonstrate a
profoundly inadequate historical and
political vision. The great service that
David Wilson has done is to challenge
the inadequate historical and political
vision that far too many politicians,
journalists, policy-makers and
ordinary members of the public
manifest.
Prison’s Origins
Prison’s origins lie in the mid-19th
century, and are related to the
challenge of maintaining order
during the social upheavals
8
occasioned by the rise of industrial
capitalism and the growth of the
large industrial cities. Does this mean,
as David Wilson argued in his lecture,
that prison ‘is a useless, outdated,
bloated Victorian institution that is
well past its sell-by-date’? There are a
mixture of historical and political
judgements in this statement that are
worth separating out.
Prisons as we now know them did
emerge during the Victorian era and
their use since the mid-19th century
has only grown. Their origins are
Victorian; their current size rightly
characterized as bloated. Yet the fact
remains that prisons’ greatest growth,
and their most systematic use, has
been in the 20th and 21st centuries,
not in the Victorian era.
Unless we are to explain this as
being the result of some kind of
mass and long-term public policy
irrationality, the continued
existence, and continued growth, of
prisons in a society markedly
different from the one that gave
birth to them suggests that they
continue to play a functional role in
today’s society.
Prison’s Current Role
A 2002 Social Exclusion Unit report,
Reducing Reoffending by Ex-Prisoners,
examined some key characteristics
of prisoners. It found all the
markers of a profoundly vulnerable
and needy layer in British society.
Compared with the general
population, the report found that
prisoners were far more likely to
have been taken into care as
children; to have truanted or been
excluded from school; to have
experienced long periods of
unemployment; to have been
homeless; or to have been in receipt
of benefits. They were more likely
to have left school with no
qualifications and their literacy and
numeracy skills were far lower than
the general population. They were
also more likely to be users of illegal
drugs and to have suffered from a
range of mental health problems .
The functional role prisons
continue to play, in other words, is to
contain a layer of society whose social
and personal needs are systematically
and systemically left ignored and
unaddressed. This does not mean
that such individuals have not also
committed crimes. But it does mean
that the gaze of the criminal justice
system, of which the prisons system is
part, is largely directed towards
policing the activities of the poor and
marginalized rather than the rich and
powerful. This helps to explain why
we are far more likely to find
burglars than white-collar crooks in
prison.
Abolitionism’s Challenge
Where does this leave those who, like
David Wilson and this author, would
like to see prisons phased out and
ultimately abolished? It means being
clear that prisons exist because we as
a society have decided that we do not
want to think seriously about the
deep causes of some of those
behaviours that we chose to call
‘crime’, nor develop the kinds of
public policy interventions that might
reasonably be able to resolve these
problems.
The decision to imprison, in other
words, is a political decision. The
decision to do away with prison is
likewise a political decision. It is a
decision that there can and should be
more civilized, more humane, more
effective and more rational social
responses to some types of crime and
criminalities.
It is to decide that we can develop
better ways of dealing with those
individuals who might pose a threat
to others. That locking them in a
small room with a small window and
a toilet in the corner in no way is an
adequate or humane response.
And it is a decision that involves
thinking on a much bigger terrain
than that which is occupied by the
prison. It challenges us think
seriously about how we organize our
social and economic relationships and
about the way that we care for and
protect the vulnerable and the
weak. ■
Review No. 33
Changing
Patterns of
Government and
Service Delivery
in the EU
Jeremy Smith
Council of European Municipalities and
Regions (CEMR), Paris
This article looks at how UK
government is running down a
separate track from its European
partners. A good starting point is to
remind ourselves of a few numbers.
The European Union of today, with
25 member states, has a population
of some 450 million; the UK’s
population is 60 million. And there
are some 100,000 local governments
in the member states; the UK has
about 500 local governments. So the
UK has about 15% of the EU’s
population, but less than 1% of its
local governments. Even if you
exclude France’s 36,000 from the
total, the percentages do not change
much. After all, Germany has 14,000,
Italy 8,000 and so on.
However, the UK numbers
exclude parish, community and town
councils, of which there are some
12,000. If they were given some
greater powers and public prestige,
then our system would look much
more ‘normal’.
Chris Leslie (NLGN), a fellow
speaker at the December 2005 PMPA
conference, claimed that the UK has
a long-standing history and tradition
of local self-government. I would
tend to disagree with this. In my
view, the history of British local
government (or administration) has
This article is based on Jeremy
Smith’s presentation to the PMPA’s
annual conference in London in
December 2005.
May 2006
been built far more on administrative
convenience than on the
representation of identity. We are the
descendants of the utilitarian legacy
of Bentham and Chadwick. Our
district councils are largely based on
this philosophy, bringing together
groups of small towns in a way that
masks or smothers the identity of
each of them. It may be more
efficient from some standpoints, but
it does not help citizens to see their
local government as ‘theirs’.
In most continental European
countries, on the other hand, the
emphasis has traditionally been on
the representation of place and
identity. The question has then been,
how to deliver services with
reasonable economy and efficiency.
In most countries, there has been
a move to encourage mergers
between very small communes, and
the number has been slowly falling.
But there has not been a lot of
compulsion. One current example of
merger by legal compulsion is
Denmark, which in many ways is
closer in thinking on public services
to the UK than anywhere else in
Europe. In 2007, the number of local
authorities will reduce dramatically
from 271 today to just under 100,
with a minimum population size of
20,000 (and with a change from 13
counties to five regions). And yet
Denmark has the same population as
Scotland, five million, and Scotland
has just 32 unitary councils (itself
being one ‘region’ as well as nation),
which the Scottish Executive has
questioned as being too many. So
even after these mergers, Denmark
will still have over three times as
many local authorities as Scotland.
And do we seriously believe public
services will be worse in Denmark?
The Meaning of Local SelfGovernment
The second point of comparison is
around the meaning and content of
local self-government. I was very
pleased to be present in Strasbourg in
May 1997 when the UK
representative to the Council of
Europe signed the European Charter
of Local Self-Government. At one level,
this can be seen as ‘low-hanging
political fruit’—showing some early but
gentle pro-European credentials, and
pleasing a domestic constituency. The
question is whether it has any value
greater than purely symbolic, and any
meaning beyond the purely rhetorical.
In my view, the UK still meets
most of the Charter’s requirements,
but there are at least three major
problems. Under Article 2 of the
Charter, ‘the principle of local selfgovernment shall be recognized in
domestic legislation and wherever
possible in the constitution’. Try as I
may, I cannot see how the UK
government feels it complies with this
(the civil service line is that the
totality of legislation shows we meet
the requirement, but I have never
seen it justified by reference to any
legislative text).
The second ‘problem’ with UK
compliance is that Article 8 says that
any ‘administrative supervision’ of
local authorities must ‘normally’ aim
only at ensuring compliance with the
law and with constitutional
principles. The weight and volume of
central controls and inspections that
central government has imposed on
local government makes it impossible
to argue that this article has been
fully respected.
The third problem relates to
finance—there should be a
‘sufficiently diversified and buoyant’
system of local government finances,
but there is no space for that one
here.
In truth, having signed and
(laudably) swiftly ratified the Charter,
the government quickly put it on the
top shelf to gather dust. Yet in most
other European countries—even
where some of its provisions are not
honoured—the Charter is seen as a
significant document. Local selfgovernment and democracy feature
in most constitutions, in particular
countries like Spain and Portugal
when they became democracies in the
1970s, and in the countries of central
Europe after 1989. The Swedish
9
constitution is perhaps the clearest
example with self-government
featuring in its first article. In
virtually every country, local
government is recognized as part of
the constitutional balance of power.
The main exceptions are the UK,
Ireland and the Netherlands.
Models of Local Government
If the principle of local selfgovernment is almost universally
enshrined in a constitutional sense, in
reality there are wide variations in
the typologies and powers of local
authorities. In a rather provocative
but useful essay, the German
academic Professor Hellmut Wollman
has described German local
government as ‘politically strong,
functionally strong and operating on
a viable territorial basis’. He then
places Germany with the
Scandinavian countries in a ‘North
Middle European’ group of countries
who share these characteristics. The
second group he calls the ‘Franco
group’, which is ‘characterized by
strong political but weak functional
features…operating on an
undersized, functionally non-viable
territorial basis’. The third is the
‘Anglo group’ which is ‘distinguished
by weak political as well as weak
functional features and operating on
an over-sized, politically and
democratically hardly viable format’!
Even if this falls over the edge into
caricature, the picture it draws has a
certain truth, but I would suggest just
a few more groups of countries—or
models.
First, let us look at the features of
the Scandinavian model. The actual
units of government are quite small
still, even after the Danish mergers
that are taking place. The system is
based on high GDP, high tax and
high level of services. Local
governments are given a very wide
range of functions and spend a high
proportion of the public budget (as
well as of GDP). Their decisionmaking model is still firmly based on
the committee system, and they do
not have ‘strong mayors’. Tendering
10
and outsourcing is common and not
controversial but not compulsory.
There is still a good level of electoral
turnout (not harmed by Sweden
holding national and local elections
together).
Second, a quick look at Germany
and Austria. Here, we find a very
strong sense of local self-government,
which means that any attempt to
‘interfere’—from the federal
government, the Länder or ‘Brussels’
is much resented. There is an equally
strong sense of working for the
common good. The municipality has
a wide range of ‘own tasks’, but also
has delegated tasks from other levels
of government. In turn, many of its
tasks are delegated to social
organizations. There is still much
emphasis on the running of utilities,
often through local government
companies. There is in practice a lot
of tendering, but many towns are
extremely proud of their own
services and deeply resent external
requirements to tender. In the past,
Germany had different systems of
local government, but the largest
Land (North Rhineland Westphalia)
introduced elected mayors a few
years ago—though German mayors
tend to combine aspects of the
political and chief executive roles.
Turnout in local elections is still quite
high.
Third, the ‘Franco group’. France
presents a complex picture, not
simply because of the number of local
authorities, but because the high
number of basic level authorities has
required, in practice, an enormous
amount of joint arrangements of
different kinds. Another complexity
results from the multi-hatted nature
of French political life, where the
mayor is likely to be also an
important national political actor.
Moreover, since functions are not
always clearly defined between the
different levels or types of local or
regional government, networking
and co-operation between them is
also essential. Spain shares some
features of the French system—
including the strong mayor model
(which in both countries comes from
the electoral list system, not from
direct elections for the mayor). It has
seen some major successes in
modernizing city centres and in
urban regeneration—often with an
architectural bravado that most UK
cities have not had the courage or
means to follow—yet in financial
terms, Spanish local authorities are
still weak, spending quite a low
percentage of the public budget.
Devolution in Spain has been almost
wholly to the benefit of the regions,
the autonomous communities. Both
France and Spain continue to have
high levels of turnout (by UK
standards). In both countries, a wide
range of service delivery models are
used, including public–private
companies as well as pure
outsourcing. Again, there is no sense
that the government should or could
lay down mandatory standards for
services.
Fourth, the central Europe group.
Here, the task is still mainly one of
getting the basic tasks done well, of
improving basic standards of
administration, and finding the
necessary finances to keep services
running effectively, not to speak of
finding investment capital. In most
countries, the actual range of
competences—at least for larger
towns—is considerable, including
health and public transport. The
need for investment is a powerful
push factor towards private sector
solutions for service delivery, or—at
least in principle—for PPPs.
Regions and City Regions
For good reason or bad, the UK has
chosen, so far, a different approach to
regionalization from most other
countries, in particular through its
‘variable geometry approach’ of
having very different solutions for
different bits of its territory. Almost
everywhere else, except Portugal, an
elected regional level of government
has been created or strengthened.
This is partly to do with European
regional policy (structural funds), but
also reflects other factors including
Review No. 33
regional identities as well as
administrative devolution.
Regions come in many different
forms—the legislative regions in
federal states like Germany, Austria,
Belgium; and the legislative regions
in Spain and Italy (and Scotland)
where a strong devolution to the
regions helps to resolve political
problems for the national
government; administrative regions
in many countries, including France
or Poland; and in other countries
where—in effect—counties or
provinces are rebranded as bright
new regions.
The city region question is a
different one—since it is mainly
about the sustainable development of
an economically coherent
metropolitan area. The truth is that
there is no perfect answer to the cityregion governance problem. You
either choose to create a very large
political unit (the city region) and
then create the subdivisions necessary
for democratic life and service
delivery at more local level. Or you
take the city government and
surrounding town governments, and
create forms of co-operation (which
may include new legal structures),
usually by each authority appointing
members to it, rather than by direct
election. I am not aware of any
evidence that one model tends to
produce better results than another.
London and Paris have very different
governance models—yet the actual
politics and impact of Ken
Livingstone and Bertrand Delanoe
seem to me to be remarkably similar.
Common Strands
Are we able to draw out a few
common strands about what is
happening in Europe’s local
government? Well, here are a few:
•There is a tendency—not yet
universal—for the role of the
mayor to become stronger. This is
due in particular to the need, in a
‘mediatic’ age, for there to be an
identifiable figure-head.
•Money is tight everywhere, and
May 2006
increasingly so as the EU economic
criteria require central
governments to limit local
government spending, and where
changes in local economies can
have drastic effects on local tax
bases. This puts pressure on local
authorities to look for solutions
that involve the private sector on a
wider basis than before. So
tendering is slowly becoming more
generalized.
•For nearly 20 years there has been a
slow move towards more
performance management, but
nowhere else through the sort of
top-down system that successive
UK governments have imposed.
An increasing number of larger
authorities are comparing their
services on a peer-to-peer basis—
the issue for the future is whether
local government associations can
develop effective mutual learning
systems and structures that preempt pressures from central
governments to intervene.
•There is an increased recognition of
the principle of public
participation. Sometimes this
means simply good quality
consultation, or neighbourhood
meetings or councils. This is
probably the most open subject for
the next decade, linked with the
issue of how to integrate new
communities into the democratic
life of the town.
The EU Dimension
It would be wrong to talk about local
government in Europe without even
a brief mention of the EU’s impact.
First, we must not forget the role
and economic importance of the
structural funds for the regions and
cities which receive them.
Second, it is worth noting that—
thanks to lobbying by organizations
such as mine—the European
Constitution explicitly recognizes the
principles of local and regional selfgovernment. It also strengthens the
requirement on the European
Commission to consult local and
regional government. We must
ensure that these gains are
maintained in any future treaty, if the
constitution does not proceed.
The most contentious subject at
present, however, is around the
interface between local selfgovernment (local choice on how to
run services) and the EU’s internal
market and public procurement
rules, which are pushing towards
more and more competitive
tendering. Recent Court of Justice
decisions have undermined longstanding inter-communal
arrangements, and made it very
difficult to delegate tasks to a local
government-owned company without
a tendering process. These rules, as
they are being developed and
interpreted, could have a major
impact on the National Health
Service and, in particular, on the
proposed sharing of back office
services by UK local authorities.
Conclusions
We have not had a real debate in the
UK about local self-government—
and we need this debate. What is the
geographic or demographic unit that
combines a sense of identity with
sufficient finance and powers to be
able to make a difference in and to
the area? Should we seek to
strengthen our parish and town
councils, especially the market towns?
There is no evidence that shows
that, after all the years of restless
centralizing, capping budgets,
inspecting, permanent reorganizing,
creating bigger units, reducing
councillors and so on—the UK model
produces better results than those
produced under different models
elsewhere.
At the same time, I recognize that
there is a willingness in the UK to
look at other examples, to try out
new ideas, which is often absent when
one looks at practice in other parts of
Europe. So some degree of pressure
from ‘above’ may be a positive
force—but if we want a better balance
in our constitution, it is time to give a
stronger role and place to democratic
local self-government. ■
11
Managing in a
Political
Environment:
Views of Local
Authority Chief
Executives
Richard Penn
PMPA Executive Committee member and
former Chief Executive of Bradford City
Council
Every year a sizeable number (20 or
more) of the 400 or so local authority
chief executives in England and Wales
prematurely leave the organizations
they lead. Most go unwillingly—the
victims of a breakdown in the
relationship between themselves and
their employers. Despite this,
departures are generally achieved
quietly and largely consensually,
although there have been a few recent
cases—David Bowles in Lincolnshire
and Sari Conway in Eastbourne for
example—which have produced a
great deal of press coverage.
Statutory Protection in Practice
A local authority’s ‘head of paid service’
(normally the chief executive) has
statutory protection from dismissal as
does the chief finance officer and the
monitoring officer. The effect of
statutory protection is that no
disciplinary action, including dismissal
for any reason other than redundancy,
ill-health, or non-renewal of a fixedterm contract, may be taken by the
council against these officers except as
recommended in a report by a
‘designated independent person’ (DIP)
and no notice of dismissal may be given
without the approval of full council.
Councils have recently been making
increasing use of the DIP procedure.
This has ranged from threats and the
initial stages of disciplinary action
through to complete DIP hearings.
There have been about eight serious
12
cases (seven in England, one in Wales)
in the past two to three years and about
the same number again where it has
been a background feature. The
explanation appears to be
multifaceted:
•The relationship dimension. Senior
managers, appointed to serve the
whole council, used to survive a
change of political administration ‘as
of right’. Over time, a tendency to
seek a change of chief executive on
change of administration became
more common and has extended to
a change in political leader(ship).
•The accountability dimension. The
creation of political executives was
designed to make decision-making
more transparent and accountable.
The use of performance indicators,
league tables and CPA has put
pressure on councils judged to be
under-performing. Rightly or
wrongly, those political executives
have passed the accountability onto
their senior staff, especially chief
executives, and decided they need
to make a change.
Against this background of greater
volatility and accountability there have
been three trends:
•Chief executives are being appointed
younger and are often under 50
when problems arise. They are
unable to retire on attractive
pension terms and so are more
likely to try to remain in post. The
situation will worsen when the age
of access to pension rises to 55.
•Older chief executives, able to agree
departure terms with their
employer, can find the deal being
undermined by the external auditor.
Auditors have helped to establish
case law restricting the generosity of
departure terms and challenge
proposed settlements or, even
worse, unpick those closed some
years earlier.
•Executives seeking to replace their
chief executive in difficult
circumstances can be concerned
about media reaction. The increased
transparency around departure
terms means they are likely to be
asked why they are paying off a
chief executive perceived as
successful, or alternatively why they
are rewarding one who is
considered to have failed.
A combination of the difficulty of
negotiating acceptable terms, coupled
with the problem of handling media
perceptions, appear to be the main
drivers behind the increasing tendency
to threaten to involve a DIP and
actually doing so. As cases have become
more formal with references to DIPs,
so they have become more concerned
with legal issues and that has increased
the time and cost involved.
Another Way
The Association of Local Authority
Chief Executives (ALACE)—the chief
executives’ trade union—has been
invited by the ODPM to comment on
the difficulties that arise between
statutorily protected officers, especially
chief executives, and their councils and
the optimal means of resolving them. It
will recommend that as an alternative,
or addition, to making improvements
in the current system, there should be
‘pre-nuptial’ or contract severance
agreements for officers. It is common
for those in the private sector taking
senior posts to negotiate leaving terms
at the time of appointment, along with
pay and other conditions. The
company and the individual accept that
there might be clashes of style or
personality or philosophy in the short
term, or as a result of changes to other
posts, or that a time might come when
a different approach is needed and
that means a change at the top. This is
a mature approach, which attaches no
PMPA Lecture
Cheryl Miller (Chief Executive of East
Sussex County Council) and Richard
Penn will be giving a PMPA lecture on
Managing in a Political Environment on
28 June 2006 in London. See the back
cover of this issue for further details.
Review No. 33
blame; it simply recognizes the reality
of relationships and manages the risk
from the start. If there is a need for a
parting of the ways, it can be done
quickly and with dignity.
Contrast that with the situation in
local government. There is no
preplanning and difficult relationships
fester while the parties struggle to find
a way out. Unless the chief executive
finds another job, the situation
deteriorates. The council has no valid
grounds for dismissal but wants a
change. Depending on the age and
length of service of the chief executive,
the flexibility of the council and the
attitude of the external auditor, a deal
might be possible. If not, recent
experience suggests that a frustrated
council will look for reasons to initiate
disciplinary action and relationships
breakdown totally while these processes
are played out.
The council often spends a
considerable amount on specialist
employment and legal advice and
perhaps an interim chief executive.
There is a debilitating effect on the rest
of the staff. The suspended chief
executive often becomes stressed and
requires medical assistance. Whether
or not the case reaches the national
media, it usually damages the
reputation of the council and its
leadership and, sometimes, the chief
executive. If the chief executive is old
enough to retire they are lost to fulltime work in local government due to
pension claw-back provisions. Those
who are younger rarely continue in
local government: this can be because
the prevailing culture sees them as
failures and/or they are so bruised by
their experience they will not risk
repeating it.
At a time when there is national
concern about a dearth of strong
leaders for the most senior posts in
local government, it is counterproductive to have arrangements
which damage the image of councils,
certainly in the eyes of those
considering promotion, and constitute
a brain-drain from the industry. Some
say that a pre-nuptial or contract
severance contract would make divorce
May 2006
too easy; that on a change of
administration the members would
invoke it to employ someone they were
more comfortable with, without giving
the incumbent a chance to prove
themselves. There is such a risk, but a
provision for mediation could be built
in. In any event, the objection is
grounded in the existing culture that
sees the ousted chief executive as a
failure but the point of moving to prenuptial or contract severance contracts
is to change the prevailing culture.
There is also a risk that councils would
use the new climate to appoint chief
executives more aligned politically with
the council. However, that happens
already despite the constitutional
safeguards covering appointments and,
so long as the post holder operates
within the law, it doesn’t really matter.
The aim must be to streamline the
regime for the parting of the ways of
the three statutory officers (it could be
extended to other senior posts) in cases
of total relationship breakdown in a
way that is fair to all concerned.
Retention of statutory protection will
protect the post holders from the worst
political excesses.
If legitimate concerns exist about
misconduct or incompetence, councils
will be able to take appropriate action
in the public interest. Where these
concerns are invalid, the departing
staff should have no taint of discipline
on their records and should be
rewarded fairly for the loss of their
contract and reasonable expectations.
Leadership United
The Society of Local Authority Chief
Executives (SOLACE) has also
addressed the problem of ‘casualties’
among the ranks of those officers. It
established a Commission (comprising
council leaders from each of the three
main political parties, serving chief
executives, business leaders, a former
permanent secretary, representatives of
the media, the law and academics) in
early 2005 to investigate how effective
management might best be achieved in
a political environment at the local
level. The Commission’s report,
Leadership United, contains a range of
recommendations, the key ones being:
•Chief executives should always form
part of the appointments panels for
the officers who report directly to
them and that members should
consider seriously any advice that
they give.
•Good communication has to be
planned, developed and nurtured.
All new chief executive and leader
pairings should give consideration
to how this can be best be
established.
•All governance bodies, including
possible new neighbourhood forums
or committees, should be required
to audit their governance
arrangements according to the
Langlands Standard or the CIPFA/
SOLACE Corporate Governance
Framework.
•Political parties, both locally and
nationally, may wish to consider
whether they could and should be
doing more in terms of identifying
the future skill base needed for
politicians, using selection methods
that ensure potential against these,
appraise the performance of those
that are elected and put in place
training and development
programmes to help develop the
politicians of the future.
•All authorities should take a careful
look at the capabilities of their staff,
senior officers and politicians in the
area of managing in a political
environment, identify the gaps that
exist, consider what training and
support would be needed to fill
those gaps and then, with the help
of professional training advisers,
prioritize and address their training
and development needs.
•The Standards Board for England
should work with the LGA,
SOLACE and the Association of
Council Secretaries and Solicitors to
develop a national framework
within which there is greater scope
for local resolution of standards
issues.
•Chief executives should continue to
have statutory protection from
dismissal based on perceived
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political differences that are not
based on underperformance or
misconduct.
•When confidence does break down
between a leader and a chief
executive, attempts should be
made to resolve the matter
amicably. If this is not possible,
external auditors should take a
stance which has the long-term
interests of the council and the
citizens it serves at its heart and in
a way which is consistent with the
way similar disputes have been
handed in other authorities.
•Political parties should devise clear
procedures for dealing with
councillors accused and found
guilty of breach of council or
national codes of conduct and
ensure that all councils apply them
rigorously.
Conclusion
This is a major issue for local
government which demands an
urgent and honest reappraisal of the
relationship between councils and
their most senior managers in the
interests of the councils, the officers
concerned and the communities they
serve. I can only hope that those in
central government who hold the
keys will seriously consider the
SOLACE and ALACE solutions in the
interest of all concerned. ■
Leadership
Development
in Higher
Education
Ewart Wooldridge CBE
Leadership Foundation for Higher
Education, London
It is just two years ago that the
Leadership Foundation for Higher
Education (LFHE) was formally
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launched by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Gordon Brown. It was
one of the last parts of the public
sector to have a dedicated centre for
leadership and management
development. Its provenance was not
wholly unpolitical as the preceding
years had been characterized by
occasional negative comments by
senior politicians on the quality of
leadership in our universities.
In this article I will endeavour to
address some key questions such as:
•Are politicians still criticising the
quality of higher education (HE)
leadership?
•What are the main leadership
challenges facing HE?
•What techniques have we adopted
to support leadership
development?
•How easy is it to lay the foundations
for long-term, sustainable
development processes?
A Sector Leadership Still Under
Fire?
It is a remarkable fact (coincidence?)
that there has not been a major
public criticism by politicians of the
quality of HE leadership since LFHE)
was launched! We would of course
like to claim credit for this at the
LFHE! Perhaps the key was for the
sector to demonstrate that it was
prepared to invest in addressing the
issues. More importantly, the
evidence we have collected so far is
that we are not coping with a ‘deficit
model’. On the contrary, the evidence
of performance in HE institutions is
one of a remarkable capacity to deal
with a succession of changes from
government related to growth,
regulation and funding. So we are
building on success.
The other factor is that the sector
went about the issue of defining our
remit in a characteristically thorough
and evidence-based way. This
encouraged a better level of buy-in
than if the LFHE had been hastily
flung together. The main research
and scoping work was undertaken by
Professor Robin Middlehurst who is
on secondment from the University
of Surrey. With strong senior team
members from a variety of sectors,
and still keeping the core staff team
at 16, we were probably seen by the
sector and politicians alike to have
struck the right balance of sector
understanding, fresh blood and a
lean organization.
Leadership Challenges Facing HE
By not dwelling on a deficit or failure
model, we focused almost exclusively
on future challenges—the capacity of
universities and HE colleges to cope
with a relentless set of drivers for
change. The LFHE undertook a
major survey in the autumn of its
first year, analysing the challenges
and asking leaders at all levels what
leadership and development issues
were thrown up by these drivers. The
survey results were debated at a UK
HE Leadership Summit in December
2004 which synthesised the results
into a list of the 15 major challenges
in HE to 2010 (see figure 1). The
three most significant of these are
discussed in this article:
Figure 1. Key strategic
challenges for UK higher
education institutions.
Expansion
Access
HR
IT/e-learning
Resources/estates: project
management
Governance
Sustainability and social/cultural
agendas
Embedding equality and diversity in
all institutional activities
Funding/fees
Market positioning
Competition/collaboration
Enhancing student experience—
teaching and learning
Research—management and staffing
Internationalization
Business/regional/community links
Review No. 33
•Succession planning and talent
management.
•Handling change.
•Competition and market positioning
(in the UK and internationally).
Nurturing Tomorrow’s Leadership
Talent
Across the 170 institutions served by
the LFHE, a remarkable diversity of
processes exists to select and support
future leaders. While this diversity
may never go away, there is a real
recognition that more systematic
processes have to be put in place to
nurture tomorrow’s leadership
talent, particularly as leadership is
not necessarily the overriding career
motivation where excellence in
research, teaching and learning may
be more powerful personal drivers.
Handling Change
Few sectors have the intense
combination of change drivers set out
in figure 1. While there was already a
reasonable amount of management
development of individual leaders,
there was less evidence of systematic
leadership development for senior
and project teams. This has
prompted a significant set of
processes by the LFHE in
institutional capacity building.
Marketing and Fund-Raising
The introduction of variable fees
and a market in bursaries has
increased the potential for
competition across much of the UK,
and the rhetoric of ‘brand’, and
even ‘customers’, has steadily crept
in, with an associated demand for
development of marketing and
fund-raising skills. At the same
time, HE combines an increasingly
competitive environment with the
requirement to collaborate in
research and regional agendas.
Techniques to Support Leadership
Development
The LFHE offers a top management
programme for HE. This involves
action learning, mentoring and
networking between participants over
May 2006
a six-month period. Ten out of the 14
recent appointments of vice
chancellors are alumni of this
programme. This success has been
underpinned by creating similar
programmes for less senior
individuals and creating powerful
alumni and professional learning
networks.
Such development programmes
for individual leaders at all levels
has been balanced by interventions
to support leadership teams. There
is a growing demand for
organization development
consultancy to support senior teams
and change programmes. LFHE
fellowships and a change academy
have also been introduced to
support strategic change processes
inside institutions.
The evolving governance
relationship is a key issue in HE,
and the LFHE has taken over and
grown the Governor Development
Programme for members of
governing bodies and their chairs
previously run by the Committee of
University Chairs. A pioneering
joint event for pairs of vice
chancellors and their chairs has also
been successfully held.
Laying the Foundation for
Sustainable Development
These are early days, and the
present portfolio of charged
programmes is matched by
significant development funding
and investment from the LFHE.
The key to long-term sustainability
probably lies in the growth of
customized interventions, whether
as organizational development
consultancy or in-house leadership
development programmes built
around LFHE templates. The other
crucial factor is to retain an overall
approach which does not preach
managerialism, combines challenge
with a respect for the underlying
cultures of HE and uses the real
issues of HE management as the
focus of development and not
imported case studies from others
sectors. ■
PMPA Governance
The Advisory Board provides strategic advice
on the PMPA’s programme and activities:
David Normington (Chair) Home Office
Michael Clarke (Vice Chair) University of
Birmingham
Tom Lewis (Secretary) CIPFA
Andrew Adonis DfES
David Andren SPS PMF
Jonathan Baume FDA
John Benington Warwick IGPM
Ann Blackmore NCVO
Faith Boardman
Brian Briscoe LGA
Jane Broadbent British Accounting
Association
Stephen Bubb ACEVO
Peter Collings Scottish Executive
John Dunford SHA
Noel Hepworth IPF
Keith Jones AUA
Grant Jordan PAC JUC
Richard Mallett CIMA
Caroline Mawhood NAO
Derek McAuley IHM
David Prince Standards Board for England
Ken Rose CACFOA
Margaret Saner CMPS
Sumita Shah ICAEW
Joan Smyth Chief Executive’s Forum
Vernon Soare ICAEW
Francis Terry LSE
Alan Tyler FPS
David Walker The Guardian
The Executive Committee plans and oversees
the delivery of the PMPA’s annual programme:
Joan Jones (Chair)
Michael Clarke (Vice Chair) University of
Birmingham
Tom Lewis (Secretary) CIPFA
Jonathan Baume FDA
Mike Bennett SOLACE
Jeremy Cowper Defra
Erica De’Ath CAFCASS board member
Nigel Edwards NHS Confederation
Elizabeth Filkin Rainer Trust
Steve Freer CIPFA
Clive Grace Cardiff Business School
Andrew Gray Editor: PMM
Richard Penn
Jonathan Slater Cabinet Office
Claire Tyler Social Exclusion Unit
Ewart Wooldridge LFHE
15
Joining PMPA
The Public Management and Policy Association (PMPA) has been successfully helping managers, policy-makers and academics keep in touch
with and understand the wider cross-cutting developments in public policy-making that affect the governance, general and financial
management of public services since June 1998. Overseen by a panel of leading public service figures, and backed by over 20 associated
professional organizations including those in the accountancy, government and police sectors, the PMPA is well placed to anticipate and
focus on key and emerging themes within the public sector and public services management. The PMPA publishes a journal, Public Money &
Management, five times a year, this quarterly PMPA Review and occasional PMPA Reports. It organizes a programme of evening lectures, an
annual conference, occasional sounding boards and workshops. The PMPA operates on income from selling corporate and individual
memberships.
Corporate membership of the PMPA offers organizations excellent value for money by extending individual member benefits to several
individuals within the organization. You can select the number that best meets your organization’s needs. For example, for an annual
subscription of £350 you can nominate up to five people to benefit; an annual subscription of £495 would extend benefits to up to 10 of
your key individuals. All nominated members receive the member benefits direct to their home or business address, whichever is more
convenient.
Individual membership rates are currently:
£80 per year for full members.
£75 per year for members of PMPA associated organizations and CIPFA members.
£37.50 per year for full-time students, unwaged or retired members.
Joining information is on our website: http://www.pmpa.co.uk. Or you can contact Sandra Harper for a membership form—email:
info.pmpa@cipfa.org. Tel.: 020 7543 5600. Fax: 020 7543 5695. Postal address: PMPA Member Services, CIPFA, 3 Robert Street, London
WC2N 6RL.
Partnership Opportunities
The PMPA is keen to work in partnership with like-minded organizations in order to develop new events and services for members, bring in
new income sources and reach new people. If your organization is interesting in working with the PMPA please contact Janet Grauberg,
Development Director, on 020 7543 5683 or email janet.grauberg@cipfa.org for a discussion.
Forthcoming Events
New events are frequently added to our list of events. Members are mailed with details once an event is confirmed. PMPA’s website is
always up to date on events and it is a good idea to check in frequently to see what’s coming up: http://www.pmpa.co.uk.
Forthcoming evening lectures (starting promptly at 5.45 p.m.) include:
Wednesday 10 May 2006
Adam Sampson, Director, Shelter—Green and Pleasant Land: Can We Address the UK’s Housing Crisis Without Concreting Over the
Countryside? To be held in Robert Street, London.
Wednesday 28 June 2006
Cheryl Miller, Chief Executive of East Sussex County Council, and Richard Penn, PMPA Executive Committee member and former Chief
Executive of Bradford City Council—Managing in a Political Environment. To be held in Robert Street, London.
PMPA lectures are free of charge and open to all, but priority on attendance is given to PMPA members. Contact Sandra Harper to book
places—email: info.pmpa@cipfa.org. Tel.: 020 7543 5600. Fax: 020 7543 5695. Postal address: PMPA Member Services, CIPFA,
3 Robert Street, London WC2N 6RL.
PMPA Annual Conference: Tuesday 5 December 2006, London
When Will We Ever Learn: Can Public Sector Organizations Learn from Their Mistakes?
To register your interest in attending and to receive further information, please contact: Rikki Ellsmore, Courses Unit, CIPFA, 3 Robert Street,
London WC2N 6RL. Tel.: 020 7543 5746; email rikki.ellsmore@cipfa.org.
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Review No. 33