PESC: Past and Future

Richard Clarke and Alec Cairncross

Chapter 13 in Public Expenditure, Management and Control, 1978, pp 147-164 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In the course of this narrative from the beginnings of ‘Plowdenry’ to early 1966, I have interspersed a great many comments, both those of the time and in retrospect. I shall not repeat them; and in this last chapter I shall try to look at PESC in historical and critical perspective. If the years of effort devoted to it since 1960 have been justified, the future will recognise it as one of the great historical reforms in the control and management of public expenditure, in the same line as the Exchequer and Audit Department Act of 1866, which brought together into one system the procedures of Estimate, Appropriation, Expenditure and Audit, and Sir Warren Fisher’s reform of 1920, that the Permanent Secretary of each department should be Accounting Officer, ensuring that responsibility for policy and responsibility for finance were inextricably linked together, and that control of finance was no longer an ‘outpost’ of the Treasury. If what (for the sake of convenient abbreviation) one may call the PESC system succeeds and survives, this will be seen as the point at which control was established over the public sector of the second half of the twentieth century — double the old ‘Supply’ and involving scores of institutions, from nationalised industries to local authorities to a great miscellany of public bodies. It is this survival power that is examined in this chapter.

Keywords: Public Service; Local Authority; Central Government; Public Expenditure; Dual Task (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1978
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-03738-4_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349037384

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-03738-4_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().