The situation in criminal justice is part of a wider context of reforms of the way in which public services and government operate, in Great Britain as a whole but particularly in England. Especially in criminal justice, but also across the whole range of government activity, ministers have for the past 30 years been more active than at any time since the post-war Labour government, both in promoting new policies and legislation and in the day-to-day running of their departments. They have also become more ambitious in what they try to achieve. Chapters two and three described the weight and volume of the reforms that Conservative and Labour governments introduced between 1979 and 2010, the results they achieved and the lessons to be learned from them. Chapter four considered the means of preventing and reducing crime, and chapters five to eight examined some of the current issues for the administration of justice and the management of the criminal justice sector. How these lessons are applied and how these issues are addressed cannot be separated from the government and governance of the country as a whole – the processes by which legislation and policy are formed and put into effect and how services are provided and managed. That is the subject of this chapter.

The current Prime Minister David Cameron has stated that he ‘wants one of the great legacies of the government to be the complete modernisation of our public services’. Localisation, new arrangements for commissioning, the position of the House of Lords, and changes in parliamentary procedure are all under discussion. At the time of writing, these changes mainly affect public services such as health, education and those provided by local government, and the proposed reforms consist mainly of cuts in public expenditure, contracting out services to create competition, and allowing the ‘Big Society’ to take over functions previously performed by publicly funded statutory services. The same approach is being applied to criminal justice, but here the pace of change is slower and the details are less fully developed.

From ‘old’ to ‘new’ public administration

What has been described as the ‘old’ public administration prevailed in British government and public services from the end of the First World War more or less until the change of government in 1979.