Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTUrban and regional studies of service location concentrate on private business and financial services. In contrast, this paper uses the example of the central government civil service in Britain to develop understanding of the spatial dynamics of public services. The paper shows how the location of civil service employment has been influenced by changes in government policy over the last thirty years. It also indicates the way in which the over‐concentration of the private sector in London and the South East, throughout the period, has encouraged the decentralization of the civil service from the capital to a variety of provincial locations.

The authors use the government-commissioned Lyons review proposals for the relocation of approximately 20 000 public sector jobs from London and the South East of England as a springboard for a historical analysis of civil service dispersal in Britain. Though civil service dispersal has helped ameliorate regional disparities, this has been a secondary objective of relocation programmes. The authors highlight the interconnections between public sector relocation and civil service (re)organisation. In the 1960s and 1970s, relocation formed part of a national programme to accommodate the geographical consequences of the hierarchical and spatially centralised public sector by relocating routine functions from the capital. Today, relocation is part of a coordinated programme of public sector reform which seeks to slim down the central headquarters of the civil service—so that only strategic aspects of policy and management are concentrated in London. In the Lyons review regional development is taken more seriously than in previous programmes of relocation; however, the links between the Lyons review and Gershon's review of public sector efficiency suggests that, in the short term at least, the primary emphasis remains on reducing costs and achieving efficiency savings.

This paper examines the demutualisation of the British building societies, the trend during the 1990s for these mutual financial institutions run on behalf of their members and without external shareholders to convert to public limited companies. Demutualisation resulted from cultural change within senior management in mutual societies, which undermined their support for the idea of mutual ownership. This cultural change was a consequence of the deeper integration of mutual societies into the retail financial services sector where a different business culture was dominant. Though government has ignored the wider social impact of demutualisation, it has in fact undermined their attempts to encourage more socially inclusive forms of delivery for personal financial services. The paper makes a case for recognition of the contribution of mutual building societies to the development of more socially responsible corporate strategies. The recent wave of demutuahsations also highlights the need for mutuals to encourage greater membership involvement in the running of the organisation.

The authors examine the impact of the remote delivery of financial services on the branch network of British building societies. The current phase of branch-network rationalisation in the financial sector in Europe and North America is argued in the academic literature to be the inevitable consequence of the growth of electronic and telemediated forms of delivery of financial services. In the British building society sector, despite some evidence of branch closure as the use of the Internet and telephone call centres in the delivery of financial services has grown, the picture that emerges is of a dynamic branch network that is responding to changing customer demands and new technological possibilities. Face-to-face advice and discussions between customers and trained 'experts' remain an important part of the mortgage transaction. In the savings market, where products have become more commodified, telephone call centres and, more recently, the Internet have become more prominent, but institutions still rely heavily on the branch network to deliver services. The authors suggest that, although there have been changes in the relative importance of different distribution channels as sources of business in the financial sector, it is wrong to view these changes in terms of a simple branch-versus-direct dichotomy. A more complex picture is presented, with most institutions adopting a multichannel approach to the delivery of financial services, and electronic forms of delivery of financial services being developed as an additional delivery channel alongside the branch.