The Fulton Committee's Management Consultancy Group: The Blocks of Civil Service Work examined

Abstract

Early access to the papers of the Fulton Committee on the Home Civil Service of 1966-68 which was officially granted to the author enables the programme of work pursued by the Committee's Management Consultancy Group to be examined in detail for the first time. More than a quarter of a century later, the work of the Fulton Committee on the Civil Service has long since receded into history. Indeed, the present observer has had the opportunity to write the history of the Fulton Committee itself from the original documents. One important part of the published work that resulted was concerned with the Committee's management Consultancy Group (Fry, 1991, pp.423-39; Fry, 1993, pp.57-71), the body that added a form of manageri alism to the Fulton Committee's essentially Fabian agenda. The basis for the Management Consultancy Group's analysis was to be found in the 23 blocks of Civil Service work which it examined. These blocks were listed in Appendix II to the Group's report. What was never published was the Group's original plan of work, and this gap in knowledge is closed by the information in the tables which follow.