Did Government Cost Less?
Did Government Cost Less?
Running Costs and Paybill
Chapter 4 assesses a key element often associated with New Public Management—its capacity to effect cost-cutting in government—by looking at what happened to reported running costs in UK civil departments and the paybill of the civil service over thirty years. The analysis shows that administration costs—so far as they can be reliably tracked—rose substantially in real terms over thirty years, while civil service pay costs remained relatively stable, falling slightly against UK average earnings. That means that the increase in running costs over the period cannot be explained by a rise in civil service paybill, but rather by increases in the outsourcing component of running costs. There were some times when running costs fell relative to total spending, if that is how ‘costs less’ should be construed—but past performance provides very limited inspiration for more recent plans to cut administration costs in absolute terms.
Keywords: running costs, cost cutting, New Public Management, civil service paybill, outsourcing, administration costs
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
