The Impacts of New Public Management Policies and Reforms in UK’s Public Sector since the 90’s

Introduction

New Public Management (NPM) constitutes a set of public administration policies that were implemented for the first time in the early 80’s. The main goal of this policies is to change the bureaucratic structure in public sectors, within a framework of strategic changes that are aimed to improve the public services’ system to a more competent one, “a way of reorganizing public sector bodies to bring their management, reporting, and accounting approaches closer to (a particular perception of) business methods’ (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994, p.9).

The applying of this approach in the public sector implied a shift from Traditional Management, to different ways of seeing bureaucracy, pointing out the mistakes and failures of the previous policies in this sector, with the believe on the fact that skillful public managers with an entrepreneurial view bring value to the public sector (Moore, 1995). The key point is the shift of the paradigm, changing the public administration for the public management. Bringing the public sector to play along in the markets with competitive skills, along with the private sector, regarding services’ provision to the clients, characterized by quality and out-comings. The main change between the traditional approach and the NPM can be seen through the relation of the next chart (Figure 1).

One can understand the New Public Management through the analysis of changes in the doctrinal components, which are mentioned subsequently. Another important point explained latter are the doctrine specific impacts among the policy processes of UK’s public sector. In fact one can understand that NPM has some concern with the commercial area, in possible means, of the state’s part in services’ provision to the...

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