From Financial Control to Strategic Management: The Changing Faces of Accountability in British Local Government

In recent decades British local government has been the subject of dramatic financial and political pressures. Explores the apparently inexorable rise of approaches dominated by demands for tight financial control and the discourse of “value for money”, before going on to consider some of the ways in which these approaches have themselves been challenged with the rise of different forms of managerialism. Argues that the finance‐led changes of the 1980s helped to undermine the position of traditional welfare professionals (at first giving a more powerful role to local authority finance professionals), but were themselves overtaken by new sets of arrangements for the 1990s. The end result has been the creation of a system of complex and often confusing channels of political and financial accountability.