Executive agency

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Please improve this article if you can. (September 2008)
United Kingdom

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An executive agency, also known as a next-step agency, is a part of a government department that is treated as managerially and budgetarily separate in order to carry out some part of the executive functions of the United Kingdom government, Scottish Government, Welsh Assembly or Northern Ireland Executive. Executive agencies are "machinery of government" devices distinct both from non-ministerial government departments and non-departmental public bodies (or "quangos"), each of which enjoy a real legal and constitutional separation from ministerial control.

Contents

Size and scope

Agencies[1] range from Her Majesty's Prison Service to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. The largest agency in terms of staff numbers is Jobcentre Plus, employing 100,000 people. The annual budget for each agency, allocated by Her Majesty's Treasury ranges from a few million pounds for the smallest agencies to £700m for the Court Service to £4bn for Jobcentre Plus. Virtually all government departments have at least one agency. The Ministry of Defence has 36, the most of any department.

Issues and reports

The initial success or otherwise of executive agencies was examined in the Sir Angus Fraser's Fraser Report of 1991. Its main goal was to identify what good practices had emerged from the new model and spread them to other agencies and departments. The report also recommended further powers be devolved from ministers to chief executives.

A whole series of reports and White Papers examining governmental delivery were published throughout the 1990s, under both Conservative and Labour governments. During these the agency model became the standard model for delivering public services in the United Kingdom. By 1997 76% of civil servants were employed by an agency. The new Labour government in its first such report – the 1998 Next Steps Report endorsed the model introduced by its predecessor. The most recent review (in 2002, linked below) made two central conclusions (their emphasis):

"The agency model has been a success. Since 1988 agencies have transformed the landscape of government and the responsive and effectives of services delivered by Government."
"Some agencies have, however, become disconnected from their departments ... The gulf between policy and delivery is considered by most to have widened."

The latter point, is usually made more forcibly by Government critics, describing agencies as "unaccountable Quangos".

List of executive agencies by department

Attorney General’s Office

Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (Department for)

Cabinet Office

Communities and Local Government (Department for)

Culture, Media and Sport (Department for)

Defence (Ministry of)

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Department for)

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Health (Department of)

Home Department (Home Office)

Innovation, Universities and Skills (Department for)

Justice (Ministry of)

Northern Ireland Office

Transport (Department for)

Treasury (HM)

Work and Pensions (Department for)

See also

External references

References

  1. ^ Cabinet Office - UK Government executive agencies
  2. ^ a b Department of Health - Executive agencies
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_agency"

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

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