Volume 15: Government and Public Administration
1. The purpose of this volume
Introduction

1.1 Government Departments and Ministries exist to support the elected government of the day with policy advice. They also implement its decisions, and carry out executive and regulatory functions. They operate within a shared public sector culture and its conventions. Parliament holds the executive - ie, individual Ministers and their Departments - to account for their actions. The conventions under which the executive operated between 1986 and 1996 helped to determine the nature and quality of the response to the emergence and subsequent course of BSE.

1.2 This volume describes the system of government administration within which Ministers and their civil servants operated during this period. ¹ It focuses in particular on the process of decision-making in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) and the Department of Health (DH), ² and on those aspects of it that were relevant to the BSE story. It also looks at some of the managerial preoccupations of officials and Ministers during the period 1986-96 as policy on BSE was being made. Most of the systems are essentially the same today.

1.3 In addition, it describes how Departments drew on specialist expertise, and identifies the techniques available to them at the time to assess and manage risk. It reviews their resource planning processes, and the measures that were adopted during this period to reduce the size of the public sector. It explains how the performance of the executive is normally assessed, and how Ministers and officials are held accountable. All these matters influenced the way in which Ministers and officials responded to the issues raised by BSE. The volume concludes by briefly examining the operation of local authorities, which were responsible for enforcing many of the measures introduced to protect animal and human health.

1.4 There are three annexes. Annex 1 illustrates the structure of MAFF and of DH and how they changed between 1986 and 1996, focusing on the units that were involved in dealing with BSE and new variant CJD (vCJD). ³ Annex 2 outlines the development of techniques of risk assessment, particularly those described in publications issued by Government Departments. Risk assessment itself is discussed in Chapter 5 of this volume. Annex 3 outlines the development of the Government's Deregulation Initiative from 1983 to 1996, as discussed in Chapter 7.

1.5 A large number of people are quoted or referred to by name in this volume, many of them Ministers and government officials. In the text itself, we describe their role as briefly as is necessary in the immediate context, but we have added more details about them in the 'Who's who' on page 143 (which is preceded by a Glossary of acronyms and other terms that we have used).