The Future of Public Administration - A Roundtable Forum held at Queen Mary University of London

The Centre for Government and Leadership at Queen Mary University of London will be hosting a Roundtable Forum on Wednesday 13th November at 13:00

The topic of discussion will be 

The Future of Public Management

What skills will public servants and public managers need in the coming decade?

What role will universities and national schools of public administration play in developing them?

Guest speakers:

Professor Marga Pröhl, Director-General of the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA)

Professor Marcel Proulx, former CEO of the Canadian School of Public Management (ENAP)

Professor Les Metcalfe, Professor Emeritus of Public Management, University of Bocconi; Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London

Forum Chair:

Professor Martin Laffin, Head of School, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London

This event is open to the public, if you would like to attend, please reserve your ticket here

The event will take place in the Colette Bowe Room, Queen's Building, Mile End Campus, E1 4NS

Females to the fore in reshuffle – but women’s policy input may remain limited

As expected, David Cameron has boosted the number of women in his Government. But this strategy is problematic,argue Professors Claire Annesley and Francesca Gains, and may not address the lack of women’s policy input in decision making.

Earlier this spring Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s former spin doctor, suggested that ‘Sam Cam’ was the Conservatives’ ‘secret weapon’ to win back women’s votes. This is a clear sign that in the run up to the next election the battle to win women’s votes is intensifying – and for good reason.

For many years after winning the franchise women in the UK were more likely to vote Conservative, and the ‘gender gap’ (the difference in the Conservative lead over Labour between male and female votes) was in double figures. In the 1970s and 1980s, as women’s roles in the home and the workplace changed, the gender difference in voting narrowed and psephologists argued that sex differences were not important in understanding UK voting patterns.

However the re-emergence of a small but significant gender gap in 1992, reflecting a swing by younger women to Labour, led to a sustained interest by the Labour Party in identifying and mobilising around women’s interests and demands which contributed to their successful 1997 return to office.

In the face of recent polling data, which shows falling support for the Conservative from women, the party has sought – rather belatedly – to proffer a more female friendly campaign strategy.

McBride's Muddle - Prof Perri 6, Chair in Public Management, Queen Mary

This week Damian McBride, sometime Treasury communications leader and later special advisor to Gordon Brown, published an article in Prospect magazine entitled “Not fit for purpose”. McBride claims that the policy failures and fiascos which have been discussed at length in books published this year such as Anthony King’s and Ivor Crewe’s “The blunders of our governments”[i] and Richard Bacon’s and Christopher Hope’s “Conundrum”[ii] are principally the result of the civil service being out of touch, of there being too few people among the upper echelons of the service who are female, young, from working class origins, from regions far from London, not from expensive schools and universities, or indeed who have not previously worked in the Treasury. Overcoming the narrowness of recruitment will, he claims, make the civil service more meritocratic and more “fit for purpose”.