Laurence Ferry

Newcastle City Council and the grassroots: accountability and budgeting under austerity

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on new accountability relationships between Newcastle City Council (NCC) and its citizens and stakeholders in the wake of the British government’s austerity politics and its budget cuts for local authorities. It seeks to show some of the ways in which various kinds of budgeting, for example, for alternative sources of funding, the use of volunteers for service provision, resource sharing, and asset transfers, as well as a diverse set of accounts of the social implications of resource diversions and service cuts, have been implicated in those changes. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors conducted a qualitative field study of some of the uses of budgets in the shaping of accountability relationships through interviews with council officers, conversations with activists and citizens, analysis of council and other documents, and observation of public meetings and demonstrations. The approach focused on the relationship between the city’s political grassroots and the NCC leadership and administration. Findings - – The authors find that NCC’s senior politicians and officers co-opted the city’s political grassroots and managed to reconstitute local political accountability to citizenry and stakeholders as a choice between the cessation of different types of local government services, by combining appeals to the legal framework of English local authorities, the unfairness of national politics, and the fairness of local government service provision. Local government blamed the funding cuts and the resulting resource shortages on the central government. It sought to push responsibility for cuts to the local citizenry whilst reserving for itself the role of mediator and adjudicator who makes the final decisions about the portfolio of causes that will be funded. Originality/value - – This is the first study to offer detailed insight into the effects of the British government’s austerity budget cuts of local authority grants on the politics of accountability in a local authority.

Accountability and transparency in English local government: moving from ‘matching parts’ to ‘awkward couple’?

Although excessive transparency and accountability demands can have a counterproductive effect on organisational performance (Bovens, 2005), longstanding hierarchical accountability structures to ensure financial conformance in English local government continue to endure. Interestingly however, the previously top-down regime for performance accountability in English local government has been replaced by bottom-up mechanisms such as greater transparency and a more open market for public services. Using the framework developed by Hood (2010), this paper will show how such reforms mean that transparency and accountability are moving from being ‘matching parts’ to an ‘awkward couple’, and how this has significant implications for public services.

Budgeting and governing for deficit reduction in the UK public sector: act three ‘accountability and audit arrangements’

This paper explains how the UK central government has changed accountability and audit arrangements for local government in England, while retaining its approach to setting annual budgets within the context of multi-year spending reviews. It highlights how dismantling the institutions and processes that monitored outputs and outcomes for spending, such as public service agreements and comprehensive area assessment, meant that top-down accountability became focused overwhelmingly on financial conformance rather than organizational performance for local government. Supplementary reforms to increase the transparency or ‘visibility’ of public administration, and thereby enable greater bottom-up accountability, have resulted in a performance assessment system that is neither rigorous nor standardized. The overall result is a weakening of local accountability arrangements.

Budgeting and governing for deficit reduction in the UK public sector: act 2 ‘the annual budget’

This paper explains how the UK government sets its annual budgets within the context of multi-year spending reviews, yet was able to announce policies in the 2011 annual budget that sat outside the 2010 spending review framework. As such, it illustrates that the budget process remains an enabler of changing circumstances and is not constrained by medium-term financial planning. This finding has implications for other jurisdictions that may be considering how best to balance annual flexibility with multi-year stability in public spending.

Budgetary stewardship, innovation and working culture: identifying the missing ingredient in English and Welsh local authorities' recipes for austerity management

Drawing on fieldwork with 70 local authorities in England and Wales, this paper builds on previous studies of austerity management by highlighting the importance of organisational cultures to achieving strategic objectives. It finds that, in line with their prevailing ‘belief system’ of budgetary stewardship, local authorities in both countries are holding down input costs to deal with austerity. However, the scale of funding cuts means that this strategy is unlikely to be successful over the longer term. Instead, they need greater freedom to generate revenue, in order to facilitate innovation and develop more sustainable business practices and service models.

What about Financial Sustainability of Local Government!—A Critical Review of Accountability, Transparency, and Public Assurance Arrangements in England during Austerity

ABSTRACT Austerity strained the financial sustainability of governments and ability of policy-makers to address policy challenges, and so having appropriate accountability and transparency arrangements to assure the public they were getting value for money took on renewed urgency. Comparing and contrasting findings from a critical review of policy developments in English Local Government during the Conservative led coalition central government 2010–2015 with those from related studies on accountability and transparency more generally, the article offers key themes for practitioners and policy-makers seeking to build stronger democratic systems of governance that go well beyond the UK jurisdiction.

Debate: Climate change and 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) Paris—addressing the ‘ultimate’ wicked issue

In December 2015, a host of world leaders, non-governmental organizations and other actors assembled in Paris for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) meeting on climate change. Some groups have questioned whether the resulting agreement to reduce emissions and carbon dioxide and other global warming gases may be sufficient to keep the increase in global temperatures below 2 ̊C, the threshold above which we risk potentially catastrophic ‘runaway’ climate change (Stern, 2008). Nonetheless, it does represent the most ambitious and robust global compact on carbon dioxide reduction and climate adaptation measures since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Pollitt (2015) writing in this journal, speaking later at PMM Live! hosted by Lord Bichard at the House of Lords in October 2015 that both authors attended, and writing in his follow-up debate article in this journal in February (Pollitt, 2016), stressed how climate change is a ‘wicked’ issue. Rittel and Webber (1973) were the first to use this term to describe problems that encompassed a range of stakeholders (including non-state actors) and required decision-makers to integrate objectives across different policy sectors. Furthermore, policy-makers can only really address (never really solve) wicked issues to ameliorate their negative impacts, and often have to take decisions based on incomplete or contradictory knowledge. This makes it very difficult to agree a common way forward, because some stakeholders may even disagree about the nature or extent of the problem. Crucially, however, they often need to change their behaviour to address the issue effectively: in other words, they play a key role in policy implementation. As this suggests, persuading some national governments to commit to carbon dioxide reductions may just be the easy part— delivering this agreement is likely to be the real challenge (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Indeed, Ferry speaking in December 2015 at the COP21, Cities and Regions Pavilion panel hosted by ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustanability, highlighted that:

Using management control to understand public sector corporate governance changes : localism, public interest, and enabling control in an English local authority.

Within the context of recent post-localism developments in the English local government, this paper aims to show, first, how management controls have become more enabling in response to changes in rules of public sector corporate governance and, secondly, how changes in management control systems gave rise to new corporate governance practices.,Theoretically, the paper mobilises the concept of enabling control to reflect on contemporary changes in public sector corporate governance. It draws on the International Federation of Accountants’ (IFAC) and Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (CIPFA) new public sector governance and management control system model and data gathered from a longitudinal qualitative field study of a local authority in North East England. The field study used interviews, observation and documentation review.,This paper suggests specific ways in which the decentralisation of policymaking and performance measurement in a local authority (present case) gave rise to enabling corporate governance and how corporate governance and management control practices went some way to aid in the pursuit of the public interest. In particular, it shows that the management control system can be designed at the operational level to be enabling. The significance of global transparency for supporting corporate governance practices around public interest is observed. This paper reaffirms that accountability is but one element of public sector corporate governance. Rather, public sector corporate governance also pursues integrity, openness, defining outcomes, determining interventions, leadership and capacity and risk and performance management.,Insights into uses of such enabling practices in public sector corporate governance are relevant for many countries in which public sector funding has been cut, especially since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis.,This paper introduces the concept of enabling control into the public sector corporate governance and control debate by fleshing out the categories of public sector corporate governance and management control suggested recently by IFAC and CIPFA drawing on observed practices of a local government entity.

The role of budget speech: a Malaysian Government study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the role of budget speech in the Malaysian Government as a “hybrid” for governing both the economy and social cohesion. Design/methodology/approach – Through archival research, a governmentality framework and the concept of hybrids (Miller et al., 2008) are employed to explore the role of budget speech in articulating ways in which the government managed the economic and social agenda. Findings – Previous governmentality studies have primarily been conducted on economic performance in western liberal democracies. Such research has illustrated the framework, measures undertaken by the government and choices of the governable person in actions for economic life. This paper applies these studies to a South East Asian context and finds that budget speeches between 2007 and 2011 are hybrids, in that they set out ways of achieving the two key priorities of post-independence Malaysia – the need to promote economic development whilst also fostering social harmony. M...

Framing public governance in Malaysia: Rhetorical appeals through accrual accounting

Highlights • The study focus is rhetorical appeals to logic, credibility and emotion in framing accrual accounting for good governance and anti-corruption.Fig. 1 Implementation Strategies. Source: Accountant General Office (Wan Sulaiman, CAPAM Biennial Conference, 2014).Fig. 2 Critical Success Factors. Source: Accountant General Office (Wan Sulaiman, CAPAM Biennial Conference, 2014).Fig. 3 Governance Framework. Source: Treasury Circular 1.2/2013.• We provide a case study of the adoption of accrual accounting in Malaysia employing the theoretical lens of Goffman frame analysis.• Accrual accounting can potentially improve governance and anti-corruption, but is not a panacea; other institutions also need to be strong.• The discourses around adoption of accrual accounting point to the potential of accounting for broader social outcomes. Abstract In government, the challenges of governance and anti-corruption are exacerbated by accounting not being fit for purpose. In developing countries, many governments adopt accrual accounting as a panacea. Drawing on Goffmans frame analysis, and rhetorical appeals to logic, credibility and emotion, this paper examines the adoption of accrual accounting in Malaysia. It was found accrual accounting has potential for keying governance and anti-corruption. However, rhetorical appeals that attempt to legitimate neo-liberalism and engender public support in the name of progress were hindered by perceptions of endemic corruption and relatively weak democratic institutions of ‘good’ governance common to developing countries.