By Steven Cohen and William Eimicke”The Effective Public Manager, Achieving Success in a Changing Government,” has been the standard manual for public administrators for over a decade. This third edition focuses on helping real-world managers and managers-to-be meet the demands of their jobs head-on rather than working around the constraints of government, it aims to create effective public managers who seek to shape events rather than be shaped by them. The book presents an updated and detailed examination of management innovation and examines the centrality of government in an era of global communication and economic interdependence. It also contains information on the opportunities and challenges of managing public policy from and with private and nonprofit organizations.
Whitehall departments should be moved out of London to such cities as Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and Leeds. There should also be a radical decentralisation of national institutions such as the judiciary, and bodies such as the Arts Council and the Research Councils. Without such a radical approach the North – South divide will not be reversed and the Government’s regional policies will fail. This is the main message in ‘Practical Policies for the Redistribution of Wealth, Power and Opportunity’, a report from the think tank Catalyst.The report argues that policies of “downward” devolution to regional bodies fail to recognise that regional disadvantage is the product of a long history of imbalanced inter-regional relations and the profound spatial concentration of power. The project led by Sir Michael Lyons to investigate the scope for relocating to the regions 20,000 of the 144,000civil service jobs currently in London and the South East is seen as an inadequate response to the issue.
A public policy forum is to be set up at which modernization initiatives and union concerns will be discussed by the Government and unions. The forum will be chaired by Cabinet Office Minister Douglas Alexander who is responsible for the office of public service reform. The importance of the development for the unions is that they will get early warning of modernization plans and be able to present their views at an earlier stage than is currently the case. The creation of the forum is partly a response to union anger at the way in which the foundation hospitals policy was presented to them without any discussion or proposals to pilot the concept.The forum has been condemned by the Conservative Party and the CBI as a return to the era of beer and sandwiches at Number 10.