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Arnold Taylor, or Joe as he was known to some, was a medieval scholar, archaeologist, and architectural historian, who spent his working career in the public service within the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate. An international expert on castles and, in particular, the authority on the North Wales castles of Edward I, he was not restricted in his interests in medieval buildings as a whole. Nor did Taylor study castles solely as monuments to medieval military architecture. He was fascinated by their construction, who designed and built them, where the materials and craftsmen came from, and how this side of the work was organised. As such, Taylor combined study of the standing remains with intensive documentary research. There were two other main strands to his professional life: his wider career in the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate, first in the Office of Works and ultimately in the Department of the Environment; and his service to the Society of Antiquaries of London.

The main agency tasked with regulating the railways at the time of data collection was the Railway Inspectorate, which decided on behalf of the state how the law and its objectives were given meaning in everyday life. This chapter begins with a discussion of legal objectives and Railway Inspectorate's regulatory objectives. It then draws on research data collected from staff across British Railways to determine who much they understood about these objectives.

This chapter sheds more light on the central question of this book: why it took so many decades for the full implications of the asbestos health problem to be realized and acted upon. Data disseminated in the annual reports of the Chief Inspector of Factories showed that the Factory Inspectorate did provide important insights into the dangers of asbestos for those who cared to look. However, the culture of the Factory Inspectorate militated against dealing effectively with severe industrial hazards. Matters of health and safety involved a dialogue between the Inspectors and the bosses — a dialogue from which the workers were invariably excluded. Unions were largely ineffective in modifying the provisions of the 1931 legislation and gave health and safety a low priority. Evidence from Turner & Newall also highlights the difficulty trade unions faced in opposing a powerful commercial organization.

The 1969 Regulations had for the first time set a quantitative limit for asbestos dust, yet neither the asbestos industry nor the government felt able to implement or enforce such a threshold immediately. The Factory Inspectorate stepped up its surveillance of asbestos factories and planned a new dust survey of the industry, but the demand for sampling was overwhelming. In industry itself, most of the asbestos textile factories in 1970 were operating over the 2-fibre limit and full compliance would clearly take some time. The situation was dire in Turner & Newall's overseas plants. In 1973, an inspection of the company's Canadian plant showed dangerous and dusty conditions. Of the 166 men exposed to asbestos for fifteen years or more, 91 current employees had asbestosis. The Canadian situation was mirrored in Turner & Newall's extensive African mining and manufacturing interests.

The third chapter moves on to examine the period 1860-84, looking at the impact of the developing statutory system and its central features. Underpinning the whole analysis is examination of cases illustrating the way the system was applied in practice. It demonstrates the unforeseen consequences of this legislative and centralising process: in essence, the distinctiveness of the Scottish day industrial school system was sacrificed, its original welfarist principles undermined as it became aligned to the British system regulating certified residential industrial and reformatory schools of a penal character. The chapter also covers efforts to restore the original elements of the project and the calls for reappraisal, culminating in Watson’s final, poignant public appearance when he passionately denounced the statutory system.

The history of recent policing — certainly in the last ten years — has been dominated by the increased intervention in the actions and direction of chief officers by politicians; pre-eminently the Home Secretary, but also by the inspection of police-performance regimes by HMIC and the often controversial proposals made by HMI Inspectors. This chapter considers the views of chief officers on their relationships with both the HO and with HMIC (the latter has a role in both the appointment and career management of chief officers). How uneasy many chief officers are about political interference with traditional police autonomy is a pertinent factor in this debate.

There is a close focus on the role of the Home Office and the Inspectorate of Constabulary in determining national outcomes for police and crime commissioners. How the commissioners perceive these wider relationships is explored in the first part of the chapter. The context for local accountability of the police and the role of influencing partners and colleagues is also considered, illuminated by the confidential comments of the commissioners and their police teams. The possible demise of Community Safety Partnerships is examined, together with the expanding police and crime commissioner role in local criminal justice outcomes.

This final chapter in a volume charting the development and implementation of Neighbourhood Policing brings together a number of aspects of this policing model that have been described and considered in depth in earlier chapters. In concluding the volume, it considers the relative decline of Neighbourhood Policing as a consequence of reductions to public spending, together with a sense of ‘moral disinvestment’ as a result of falling rates of crime and disorder. It is argued that whilst some within policing have tried to maintain the Neighbourhood Policing ‘brand’, the hollowing out of neighbourhood-based capacity means that its defining qualities have not always be retained. In its place we have a rather looser and less defined notion of local policing. Instead of doing ‘more with less’—a phrase that has been the austerity mantra of a number of senior police leaders—police need to think about ‘doing less with more’. That is, intervening less often but with more impact.

The introduction of the drug regulatory regime in the Netherlands was necessitated by the needs of the country to participate fully in the international community of nations dominated by the Allied victors of the First World War, and to protect the colonial opium monopoly in the Dutch East Indies. However, from the outset the strategies of the state were confronted by the tactics of smugglers and traffickers. Pharmaceutical companies, pharmacists, doctors, patients, and others all tested the boundaries and possibilities of the new regulatory regime in various practices of non-compliance with the new regime. New connections were forged between this ‘upperworld’ and an underworld of suppliers and smugglers. Illegal supply of morphine, heroin, and cocaine did not become the province of large criminal organizations, but rather of flexible and temporary networks of individual partners. On the one hand brokers originating from the pharmaceutical industry connected new forms of supply and demand. On the other hand, criminal entrepreneurs and smugglers began to sideline in the profitable illegal drug market. Distribution chains became socially embedded in bars, dance halls, and brothels. Availability of transport such as fast cars, trains, and river barges, and knowledge of transport routes (border crossings, rivers) that could not be fully controlled by the police made smuggling possible.

This chapter outlines the topography of provision for ‘pauper lunacy’ in Ireland examining the rationale behind the decision to introduce legislation in 1817 and assesses the relationship between local and national systems of asylum governance with particular reference to the establishment of the Carlow District Lunatic Asylum in 1832. The chapter demonstrates that the Irish asylum system formed part of a broader pattern of precipitate state intervention in social, medical and welfare services that inhibited a high level of centralised control and was informed by a general trend towards the institutionalisation of mental illness within allegedly ‘humane’ curative asylums evident throughout Europe in the period. Finally, it suggests that the failure to devise clear regulations, to provide a robust lunacy inspectorate and to incorporate the asylums into other forms of welfare provision ensured that legal structures were negotiated at a local level.

This chapter describes the state of school system education system in the mid-1980s, the collapse of the academic supervision system, and the heavy regulatory and administrative burden on educational administrators, so heavy that they had no time to think deeply about the reforms needed for paramount objectives like universal elementary education. It also describes the opportunities the National Policy of Education, 1986, and its flagship programmes provided to a state government, and the challenges they faced in replacing the reigning inspectorate culture of the Education Department by a managerial culture conducive to delivery of the new programmes and achievement of the programme objectives. It also describes the salient features of the British-funded Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Project, its strengths and limitations, and the challenge of ensuring that the Project is not driven by the ‘donor’.

This chapter focuses on two studies, separated by a quarter of a century, in which the Commission took a critical look at institutional structures and the conceptual underpinnings of environmental policy. In its fifth report (1976), it advocated a system of integrated pollution control, based on its concept of ‘best practicable environmental option’ (BPEO), to be implemented by a new pollution inspectorate. Though rejected at first, its recommendations had a profound influence on policy over several decades. The Commission’s twenty-third report (2002) proposed a more coherent system of land use and environmental planning, involving Integrated Spatial Strategies. In this case (at a time of planning reform) its ideas had only modest short-term impact and little lasting effect. The processes contributing to these different outcomes, including the changing political and institutional contexts, are carefully examined. Taken together, these cases tell us much about the Commission’s experience when it tried to change the policy frame, and highlight interesting differences in government responses to its reports over time.

Employee voice in enforcement and dispute resolution processes is critical to upholding minimum employment standards. Notwithstanding the crucial link between worker agency, complaints, and compliance, this issue has often been overlooked in the existing literature. This chapter explores, by way of an Australian case study, the ways in which the increasing individualization of employment regulation has partly compromised the power and position of traditional institutions for expressing voice, such as trade unions, and led to the emergence of new actors, such as the federal labour inspectorate. In light of these changing dynamics, this chapter argues that the inspectorate—now known as the Fair Work Ombudsman—has an important role to play in facilitating, harnessing, and strengthening voice in order to ensure that some protection is afforded to those workers who are the least likely to speak out.

This chapter provides a detailed examination of the politics of criminalization in four key areas: the enforcement of working time rights by the Health and Safety Executive, the enforcement of National Minimum Wage entitlements by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the enforcement role of the Employment Agencies Standards Inspectorate, and the licensing regime administered by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority. It examines these diverse regimes through an enforcement lens. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority regime provides for a system of licensing for ‘gangmasters’ in specific sectors of economic activity. The Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate statutory framework specifies that a failure of employment agencies to comply with the certain specified standards itself constitutes a criminal offence. The National Minimum Wage framework provides for a composite mechanism of civil and criminal enforcement. Finally, the various working time limits in the Working Time Regulations are enforced through criminal offences.

The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 introduced a sea change from the development plan system of the past. The new system provided for the replacement of the non-statutory regional guidance, structure plans, local plans, waste plans, mineral plans, and unitary development plans by regional spatial strategies and local development documents. As stated earlier, the Local Democracy Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 renamed the regional spatial strategies as regional strategies but basically retained the same system. The Localism Act 2011 has however swept away the whole system of regional strategies and regional authorities and replaced them simply with a duty on local authorities to co-operate.