Regional Decentralization of Government Departments in Britain
In: Canadian journal of economics and political science: the journal of the Canadian Political Science Association = Revue canadienne d'économique et de science politique, Band 24, Heft 1, S. 57-69
Vast changes have been wrought in the British governmental machinery during the past quarter-century—alterations in scope, structure, and administrative procedures made necessary in part by the rigours of economic depression and war and further intensified by the demands of an emerging welfare state. Of these changes one of the more significant has been the development by the central government departments of a complex and intricate system of regional organization to decentralize many of their more important functions. Today "administrative regionalism" characterizes the administration of fifteen major government departments. On January 1, 1956, 16,318 non-industrial civil servants (the national total was 636,771) were stationed outside Whitehall in regional offices established in eleven "regional capitals" and were working (with minor exceptions) in uniform geographical areas in accordance with established government policy. Several hundreds of thousands of the other civil servants were employed in local offices, such as post offices, employment exchanges, national insurance offices, pensions offices, district works offices, and so on. Some departments have regional offices and local offices; others have regional offices only.Decentralization of national programmes is unavoidable if governmental machinery is to function at all effectively. This is true not only in democracies, but also in countries under authoritarian rule, such as the Soviet Union. The administrative problems encountered in the decentralization of governmental functions are many. The purpose of this article is to examine Britain's experience in order to secure answers to a number of important questions. Why has it been necessary for the British to establish a system of regional administration? To what extent can the responsibilities of a national government be decentralized? What form does such decentralization take—policy formation, or administration and execution, or both? What type of administrative organization has been developed on the regional level? How is the work of a particular ministry in each of the eleven regions co-ordinated and to what degree have procedures been devised for standardizing work programmes throughout the country? Within a given region, how are matters that concern two or more departments dealt with?
