The New Bureaucracy

A LOOK BACK 50 YEARS - The Civil Service has not moved with the times:’There is underutilised potential at all levels; management unable to recognise the contribution their subordinates could make and thus unable to release it, stimulate it or put it to constructive use’      Consultancy Report on DHSS New Model Office Project 1976NOTHING HAS CHANGED! - the reality is that bureaucracy has proved remarkably durable.’Things go wrong for many reasons, The first is the wedge between policy development and policy implementation:  If the two are separated feedback is difficult and policy can become divorced from reality; but this is not widely understood’   Michael Coolican ’No Tradesmen and No Women’ 2018 ’Two former bosses say that the Civil Service is pompous and arrogant’   Chris Mason: BBC Political Reporter 2025’Bureaucracy is a legacy of Empire imbued with a sense of inequality, hierarchy and status’   Andy Becket: ’The Guardian’ 2025’Treating the machinery of Government like a complex organism rather than a machine is the only way it will be effectively deployed’   Senior civil servant: Guardian Letter 14th August 2025There is a need for public administration bureaucracy to adapt from a culture of hierarchy and servility to an ethos of sharing and support.  This will encourage the evolution of a more organic, interactive, organisation characterised by LEARNING, enabling a continuous natural development of devolved decision making.Without action the vicious circle of treadmill bureaucracy, with its impersonal, centralised, target orientated character will persist. Its failure to cope in the face of ever-increasing scale and complexity, will again be blamed on the dedicated staff, rather than on the system.STAFF WANT TO DO A GOOD JOBLET THEM TO DO IT FOR THEMSELVES