Fascinating as usual, I do enjoy reading what you have to say. I started my career with the ‘next steps’ agencies approach in full swing. I am based in scotland and its interesting that the current Scottish administration is, if anything, reversing now and ‘de-agentificating’.

Do you have a sense of where England is going on these questions of structures and delivery of services i.e. is there a new ‘theory of government’ on agencies and delivery?

I agree that major savings can be made, the devil is in the detail. But I am not sure if you can re-arrange the furniture on efficiency grounds without losing something of the ‘public good’ or constitutional safeguards stuff, and in the absence of a paradigm of some sort.

New to your blog, looks good. Where possible, I’m all for going local.

In addition to Whitehall Departments, there are a whole host of departmental agencies, many of which have admirable aims but can often dilute accountability and, ultimately, need funds to maintain their own infrastructures.

And another thing. We’re told to work in partnership (I work in the third sector) yet agencies themselves often don’t share data, perhaps for Data Protection reasons. But the net result is that infrastructures have to be set up to find out what someone else in government already knows, hence more money goes to structures and less to the end beneficiary.

What scale of cuts in jobs , pay and pentions are we talking about?

After the last ten years of “public service reforms”, I will not believe in any savings until people are receiving the redundancy notices.