The functional model has been the dominant organising principle throughout the growth of the welfare state. Perri 6 charts the development of this at national level, as well as the flaws that have developed, in the Demos publication Holistic government (6, 1997).

At the local level, the steady growth in service provision throughout the century accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1970s saw major structural reforms with reorganisations across the public services, perhaps most significantly in health and local government. These sought economic and administrative economies of scale by creating far larger organising units with large functional departments within them. However, these functions were largely determined by the growth of professional activity, and (in many cases relatively new) professional organisation, rather than by the logic of either user requirements or service delivery.

There were two linked strands to these reforms. The first was concerned with the geographical levels to be covered by the new hierarchy of tiers to be established and the functions to be covered. The second involved the importation of the then current thinking about better managerial practices from the private sector. These included corporate management, functional management structures, development of personnel departments involving manpower planning, work study, organisation and methods, industrial relations, training, and so on. Perhaps this could be described with hindsight as the start of the new public management version one. In fact, the public services have always experienced the transfer of ideas from the private sector. Sadly, this has frequently been done uncritically and with little regard to either past experience or specific contexts. Further, the public sector seems to take up ideas increasingly past their sell-by dates in the best of the private sector, largely because civil servants are not sufficiently versed in the range of very different ideologies that underpin private sector methodologies. They seem obsessed with the outworn Fordist, classical management principles of ‘one best way’, a top-down blueprint, that by definition excludes learning through practice.