Government as manager, citizen as consumer: the case of Criminal Justice Act 1991
Over the last fifteen years, wider and wider areas of public administration in the United Kingdom have become infused with a discourse hitherto associated rather with the commercial world. The concern with efficiency, always an important one, has come increasingly to be approached on the assumption that the imposition of a market-type model can deliver improvements in the quality of public administration.1 Through full-scale privatisation, but also, more recently, via strategies of partial 'contracting out' and 'market testing,' Government has adopted what might be characterised as a 'managerial approach': one in which an idealised image of the private sector is constantly held up as a model, to be compared favourably with the archaic and inefficient public sector. This has been true both in terms of Government's own strategies and in terms of the frameworks which it has imposed upon a wide range of bodies providing public goods and services.