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This chapter discusses staffing, the men and women who make up the personnel or human resources of departments and agencies of the executive branch. It concentrates on the internal regulation of the civil service, with particular reference to the values of permanence, loyalty, honesty and integrity, impartiality, and selection (and promotion) on merit. It begins by recalling the legal basis of the regulation of the service. Then, it looks at who is involved in the contemporary regulation of the civil service, and in particular at the division of responsibility between the centre in the shape of the Cabinet Office and the Office of the Civil Service Commissioners, on the one hand, and departments and agencies, on the other. Next, it examines the central requirements that apply in respect of the recruitment of staff, before looking at the requirements that apply in respect of the conduct of civil servants (and of ministers in their dealings with civil servants).

This chapter examines transformations wrought during the era of coalition cabinets. With the end of LDP hegemony, the already difficult task of providing tactical direction to government policy was exacerbated by the challenge of maintaining unity in cabinets composed of ministers from multiple parties. The eight-party coalition that formed the first non-LDP government in nearly four decades made good on a promise to enact political reform by establishing a system for electing lower house MPs. Yet even after the LDP reassumed the executive helm – albeit in coalition governments – pressure for reform continued. As a result of the efforts of a series of governments, a fundamental reorganization of government organs was carried out in 2001, resulting in the establishment of a Cabinet Office and other reforms. And yet this institutional upheaval did not give birth to cabinet government. On the contrary, this period saw the rise of disjoined cabinets that failed to restore economic growth or to effectively respond to policy challenges. As Prime Minister Koizumi and his cabinet learned through their hard-won battle to privatize postal services, it is exceedingly difficult to provide executive leadership in a fragmented policymaking landscape dominated by powerful subgovernments.

For three decades after the mid-1970s there were almost no new sociological surveys of mobility. In this vacuum, findings (or rather a distorted version of them) were repeated and cross-referenced in successive government reports. Given the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of mobility revealed in Chapter 4, this chapter traces how mistakes have been copied from one document to another. The Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s online discussion, Getting on, getting ahead is identified as a key influence on all three governing parties’ policies, with its incorrect measurements, and neglect of downward mobility. The earlier ‘Aldridge reports’ (2004, 2006) although over-pessimistic about mobility rates, briefly provided a better account.

By 2001, the Labour government had realized that there were serious risks with its complacent acceptance of the Conservative legacy. The report in 2000 by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) suggested that a 60 per cent reduction in CO₂ emissions might be required by 2050, and that could not be squared with low prices, supported by coal- and gas-fired generation. The prospect of nuclear was once again raised. The switch to imported gas posed a challenge too, especially when Germany and France could contract long-term on the basis of substantial de facto domestic market power, whilst Britain's fragmented industry had no such security for contracting. The Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit's report published in February 2002 recognized some of the problems, but provided few answers. This chapter reviews its findings and critiques the report.

This chapter examines the implementation of a ‘modernisation’ agenda in the Labour government's rural policy in Great Britain. It describes the work of the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) in preparing for the 2000 Rural White Paper and the establishment of the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). The chapter also discusses Lord Haskins' recommendations as to how to simplify the delivery of rural programmes and how to achieve Defra's rural priorities and targets cost-effectively.

Professor Liebig of Giessen University is looking back with pride on his career in organic chemistry and his keen young team of researchers in their lab ‘almost exclusively devoted to the improvement of organic analysis . . . The only complaints were those of the attendant who in the evenings, when he had to clean, could not get the workers to leave the laboratory.’ All quite typical—except that he is describing a laboratory he created in 1826. It was the first research laboratory based in a university. There were a few other laboratories but they were usually sponsored by learned societies (you can still see Michael Faraday’s laboratory at the Royal Institution) and were nothing to do with universities. Professor Liebig knew the significance of what he was doing: ‘there began at the small university an activity such as the world had not yet seen’. It was the birth of one of the most important institutions of the modern world—the research-based university systematically creating new knowledge—and it was conceived in Germany, as we saw in Chapter One. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote a short policy paper which proved to be one of the seminal documents in the emergence of the modern university, proposing that the university should become a centre of research. Underneath the idealist Hegelian prose he wrestles with issues which are still live today. He argues that research based in the university is enhanced by teaching, compared with the alternative model of research in a separate academy: . . . If one declares the university as destined only for the teaching and dissemination of science, but the academy to its expansion, one clearly does the former an injustice. Surely, the sciences have been just as much—and in Germany more so—expanded by university professors as by the academy members, and these men have arrived at their advances in their field precisely through their teaching. For the free oral lecture before listeners, among whom there is always a significant number of minds that think along for themselves, surely spurs on the person who has become used to this kind of study as much as the solitary leisure of the writer’s life or the loose association of an academic fellowship. . . .