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

Ferry, L. and Eckersley, P. ORCID: 0000-0001-9048-8529, 2015. Budgeting and governing for deficit reduction in the UK public sector: act three ‘accountability and audit arrangements’. Public Money & Management, 35 (3), pp. 203-210. ISSN 0954-0962

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Abstract

This paper explains how the UK central government has changed accountability and audit arrangements for local government in England, whilst 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 spend, such as Public Service Agreements and Comprehensive Area Assessment, meant that top-down accountability became focused overwhelmingly on financial conformance rather than organisational 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.

Item Type: Journal article
Publication Title: Public Money & Management
Creators: Ferry, L. and Eckersley, P.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 2015
Volume: 35
Number: 3
ISSN: 0954-0962
Identifiers:
NumberType
10.1080/09540962.2015.1027496DOI
Rights: © 2015 the author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions: Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by: Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added: 26 Apr 2018 08:06
Last Modified: 02 May 2018 14:04
URI: https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/33335

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