Strengthening Wales Institutional Capabilities

A persistent theme of policy in the last forty years has been a concern that there would be an improvement in welfare services if statutory organisations co-operated with each other more efficiently. Although interest in joint working has changed over time, the reasons for this interest have remained consistent, ‘Rising demand for services, coupled with the need to reduce public expenditure provides compelling arguments for greater collaboration in the UK.’ (Rummery, K. 2009)

The National Health Service (NHS) in Wales is a public funded sector which provides healthcare services to 3 million people. In 2009, the NHS in Wales went through changes to increase the quality of healthcare provision.

The dispersion of power in the UK varies greatly, each country having a different seat on the level-pegging of power over one another - in particular, policy areas, due to the various referendums, including ones already mentioned. This is called an asymmetrical devolution system.

The last main policy area noted by David Moon is the rejection of the private sector and thus heavy use of the public sector. This is the main issue in where England and Wales have severely diverged when it comes to health policy. As argued by Peter Vincent-Jones and David Hughes, this is because we have seen both countries diverge away from the norm. Wales has moved towards a public provision model whilst England has moved towards a hybrid of private and public. Vincent-Jones and Hughes point to both as diverging but point towards England as the culprit who has diverged from the social norm of the NHS, a public-funded health service, implying that if it was the other way around England may have stopped the radical agenda. This shows a key

In the NHS, since its formation one of the major debates has been the tension between a national and centralized NHS and a local and decentralized service (Peckham et al 2008). Current debates about the nature and

The United Kingdom has always been an ardent opponent of constitutional reform. In fact the very fact that through nearly a millennia they have refused to produce their constitution in a formal written structure reiterates that sentiment. And although the undercurrent of maintaining certain traditional and cultural norms remains strong, the national government has on frequent occasion had to accept the often frequent and ill-fated changes within the local government. Throughout history the lion’s share of these local changes have revolved around the relationship between the formerly autonomous countries of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. But a comprehensive analysis of these complicated relationships requires a much more lengthy background. As a result this paper will attempt to analyze the proposition of transfer of power in greater part to the local government of Scotland within the context of the last decades of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st.

This reliance on money from the treasury causes problems, especially under the Conservatives’ cuts in Westminster, as Welsh Labour has had no alternative but to withstand a cut to its overall budget. Inhibiting the ability for Welsh Labour as it cannot produce its own money outside of this block grant. The other key institutional limitations have been the lack of primary law-making powers as well as the lack of a political culture separate from Whitehall. In contrast to Scotland, Wales has not always been a primary legislative body with primary law making powers. These have only been granted by the Government of Wales Act in 2006 and implemented after a referendum in 2011. Accordingly, Michael Laffin notes that Wales was less likely to experience

During Margaret Thatcher’s terms as prime minister, she had sought to reinforce local democracy, accountability, and efficiency in the local government and yet ironically, she contributed to undermining all three aspects. She accomplished this by restricting and limiting their responsibilities, cutting local spending budgets, and pressuring them to work with private enterprises and QUANGOs to deliver public services.

These are called collaborative networks and in the article Collaborative Public Management: New Strategies for Local Governments (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003) they are discussed a bit. According to the authors, collaborative networks include “government agencies, nonprofits, and for-profits that work together to provide a public good, service, or value when a single public agency is unable to create the good or service on its own and/or the private sector is unable or unwilling to provide the goods or services in the desired quantities” (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003). An issue that a collaborative network might form around to influence public policy is healthcare. In the article A Preliminary Theory of Interorganizational Network Effectiveness: A Comparative Study of Four Community Mental Health Systems (Provan & Milward, 1995), the authors explained the structural component to effectively providing quality healthcare through a collaborative network. They summed it up best with the quote “although individual agencies obviously have an important role to play in service delivery and some agencies will clearly be more involved and provide higher quality services than others, if overall client well-being depends on receiving different services provided by multiple agencies, client outcomes should be explained by focusing on network-level activities and structures” (Provan & Milward,

‘There was a widespread public expectation that devolution would bring greater policy innovation and divergence between Scotland, Wales and the UK state.’ This essay will assess the situation of divergence and convergence in Wales with a specific focus on the period after the devolution settlement. To fully answer the question the essay shall be divided into several sections. Firstly, before attempting to answer the question it will illustrate what convergence and divergence are and the distinct types of policy areas. It will then look at the choice and the reasons for use of the case study in this essay which is the health policies of Wales. When answering the question this essay will divide the question into two sections, the first part will

Devolution allocates central powers and levels of governance within a state to share decision-making. In the United Kingdom changes in the government structure had an impact in planning policy and their function; from the devolving creation of the Welsh Assembly and Scottish parliament due to the unification of England, Wales, and Scotland. The election of New Labour in 1997 facilitated devolution and it created a pressure to establish distinctive and more culturally aligned policies. Economic globalization and the growing wish to increase economical competition have driven regions and urban areas to improve their status, requiring the planning system to reorientate their role, calling the national power into question.

The need for financial stringency in public organizations due to budgetary pressures and tax resistance coupled with the need to Managing /balancing budget deficits and provide quality services with a reduction in revenue has always been a major challenge for public organizations. The need to save money and at the same time provide quality services, had forced government agencies to privatize and contract out. Recently, there is greater involvement of the private and nonprofit sector in public service delivery. More and more government functions in service delivery are now carried out by private and nonprofit organization. This is one part attributed to the belief that private organizations can provide services more efficiently and effectively than government operated services. And the other is the fact that it is cost effective and takes a lesser time frame. These two process are indeed unarguably beneficial to the government and private sector as well as the beneficiaries, but they can be also very daunting accompanied with huge challenges especially when not executed in the rightful manner. The case of the crummy contractor by Rainey depicts such a complex situation , where the process of contracting out was poorly conducted. The case highlights the demand for privatization and contracting-out and most importantly some of the challenges of privatization and contracting in government organization. it goes on further to identify some crucial pointed to be

As the years pass us by time is not the only element that changes. The governmental system is affected by many phenomena, such as war, policy, law and power. The book written by Donald J. Savoie scrutinizes the overall structure of the public service government. He heavily examines the foundations of government to reconfiguring the organization as a whole. Breaking the Bargain was a very impressionable book; it draws on the alterations the occurred by using charts/tables, published/unpublished governmental documents and interviews with 45 present and former government officials for detailed first-hand perspectives on the system.

When we examine public sector versus private sector, plenty of differences come to mind. In defining each, we learn a private sector in an economy consist of all businesses and firms owned by ordinary members of the general public. It also consists of all the private households in which people live. The public sector in an economy is owned and controlled by a government. It consist of government businesses and firms and goods and services provided by the government such as the national health service, state

For the last forty years it has become an accepted notion that the state’s capacity in policy-making and governance has changed through the increasing use of different modes of governance, like markets, networks or associations. This essay will argue that generalised or blanket statements are unhelpful when examining state capacity in policy-making and governance and that we must begin to examine such questions on a case by case basis. In arguing this point, a comparative analysis of five case studies will be used to demonstrate why this approach is necessary in understanding the process of governance in contemporary society.