Executive Department

Introduction

Government Department

In relation to the structuring and restructuring of departments in the United Kingdom, White & Dunleavy, 2010 compared thee UK with other OECD countries: (White & Dunleavy, 2010, p. 10):

“The main Whitehall departments are critically important to how the UK state is organised. Their top ministers are secretaries of state with guaranteed seats in the Cabinet and its subcabinets and committees. The main departments also organise and give top-level purpose and direction to the wider public sector, directly controlling an apparatus of executive agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) and main quasi-governmental agencies . . . Beyond these executive bodies, the central state embraces regulatory, advisory and consultative organisations, again organised into departmental fiefdoms. Outside central government, many Whitehall departments have further extended groups of ‘client’ bodies or stakeholders, whose inputs they organise into government decision-making and whose activities they fund and link to targets. In all, there are at least 950 such arms-length bodies (ALBs) reporting to Whitehall and at least 11 distinct ‘types’ of ALB operating at different degrees of remove from Whitehall control.”

And: “Thus departments are the key bridge between the core executive of Cabinet, Prime Minister, Treasury and other core departments and committees on the one hand and the ‘front-line,’ delivery-level public sector agencies on the other: local authorities, NHS bodies, police forces and so on.” An important implication of this essential bridging role of departments is that how they “are structured and restructured matters a great deal, both at the top political level, in terms of the Prime Minister’s ability to get the best possible performance from her or his government and at the administrative level”

About the distinct “modes of ministerialization” during and after the emergence of new states in unitary and federal systems alike with parliamentary-executives, Wettenhall wrote (Wettenhall, 1976b, p. 425):

“The first . . . mode is represented by systems which have retained an older apparatus of administrative departments and made little serious effort to adjust them to the fact of ministerial government, so that the number of departments is likely to be considerably in excess of the number of ministers, the departmental titles are unlikely to correspond fully to portfolio titles, and the ministers will lack portfolio-wide co-ordinating and secretariat services to aid them in their work. In the second mode there is some limited effort to integrate the area of administration forming a minister’s jurisdiction, through the establishment of a general secretariat to serve the minister; nevertheless the departments and their permanent heads are not greatly disturbed, and therefore remain in a strong position vis-à-vis the secretariat. The third mode goes considerably further in the direction of consolidation, in that, although the departments continue to exist as distinct and recognizable entities, they become clearly subordinate to the co-ordinating secretariat; and the permanent secretary, as the minister’s principal advisor, will be found at secretariat level only. In the fourth and final . . . mode, the whole area of jurisdiction of the minister (excepting only the corporations and other clearly non-departmental agencies) is formed into a single department: the words ‘department’ and ‘ministry’ thus become interchangeable, and the units regarded as separate departments in the other modes appear only as bureaux, branches, divisions or sections of the department.”

Executive Department

This entry provides an overview of the legal framework of executive department, with a description of the most significant features of executive department at international level.

Related Work and Conclusions

Resources

See Also

Enforcement Agencies
Executive Agencies
Corporate Entities

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