How we manage public services and hold them to account is critically important. Yet austerity, recent changes to accountability frameworks, and the loss of the Audit Commission have created a huge deficit in our understanding of how well services are delivered. The time is thus right to re-examine the state of our vital public services, as well as how we can make them more accountable. This book reopens the debate on what accountability means and provides unique insights into an increasingly complex organizational landscape. It presents a new and innovative way of evaluating public services that should be of use to academics and public servants alike. Synthesising empirical work across local government, health and social care, the police, and fire services, this book also explores the relationship between financial and performance accountability and makes the case for the need for a distinctive sense of public service accountability.

Contemporary reforms of the fire and rescue service result from two excoriating reports from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee that demonstrated the inadequacy of contemporary policy, service delivery and public assurance for fire and rescue services in England. This book focuses on the key reforms proposed by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary in response to these reports and critically examines the new National Framework and the new external Inspectorate that were created as a result. Rebuilding the Fire and Rescue Services will prove invaluable for both academics and practitioners in order to build a more efficient and effective performance regime for this essential emergency service. It demonstrates the context, the parameters, the agencies and the inter-relationships that operate within the areas of policy development, service delivery and public assurance in the service. It shows how the new national framework and the new inspectorate can be improved. Most of all it shows the need for robust data and intelligence at both the national and local levels.

How we manage public services and hold them to account is critically important. Yet austerity, recent changes to accountability frameworks, and the loss of the Audit Commission have created a huge deficit in our understanding of how well services are delivered. The time is thus right to re-examine the state of our vital public services, as well as how we can make them more accountable. This book reopens the debate on what accountability means and provides unique insights into an increasingly complex organizational landscape. It presents a new and innovative way of evaluating public services that should be of use to academics and public servants alike. Synthesising empirical work across local government, health and social care, the police, and fire services, this book also explores the relationship between financial and performance accountability and makes the case for the need for a distinctive sense of public service accountability.