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The Whitehall Effect ~ John Seddon - Online Notes

Links below take you to the chapter notes:

Introduction
1. Prelude

Part 1: The industrialisation of public services
2: Call centres
3. Back Offices
4. Shared Services
5. Outsourcing
6. Information Technology

Part 2: Delivering services that work
Introduction
7. A better philosophy
8. Effective change starts with ‘study’
9. Better thinking, better design
10. ‘Locality’ working
11. IT as pull, not push

Part 3: Things that make your head hurt
12. Targets and standards make performance worse
13. Inspection can’t improve performance
14. Regulation is a disease
15. It’s the system, not the people
16. Incentives always get you less

Part 4: ideology, fashions and fads
17. Choice
18. Personal Budgets
19. Commissioning
20. Managing demand
21. Nudge
22. Procurement
23. Risk management
24. Lean
25. IT: features over benefits

Part 5 Change must start in Whitehall
26. Beware economists bearing plausible ideas
27. Whitehall is  incapable of doing evidence
28. Getting a focus on purpose

Introduction

1] From www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/recent_spending – ‘UK public spending hit £150 billion in the mid 1980s and increased slowly to £180 billion in 1989. But then spending started to accelerate in the early 1990s, hitting £200 billion in 1990 and £284 billion by 1995. Increases in public spending were modest in the late 1990s, reaching £338 billion in 2000. The early 2000s showed an acceleration in spending, breaching £500 billion in 2006. Then the financial crisis of 2008 took over, boosting public spending over £600 billion in 2009. Public spending is expected to breach £700 billion in 2014.’

2] Institute for Fiscal Studies, May 2010, Election Briefing Note No. 5. View 

3] Greg Clark, December 2012, Decentralisation: an assessment of progress, Dept. for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), p.4. View











 

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