Accountability Without Responsibility? Shared Professional Services and the ‘Problem of Many Hands’ in British Government

How can accountability for public service outcomes be determined if multiple actors have a hand in their delivery? This is a problem that pervades public administration, and has become especially prominent as policy problems have grown more complex, as partnership working has become the norm for addressing intractable and cross-cutting social issues, and as traditional, hierarchical modes of government have given way to new forms of networked governance (Rhodes, 1988; Sullivan & Skelcher, 2002; Newman, 2004; Savoie, 2004; Steets, 2010). The core difficulty of ascribing accountability to individuals and organizations in these situations of administrative pluralism is described by Thompson (1980) as “the problem of many hands.” As he explains: “Because many different officials contribute in many ways to decisions and policies of government, it is difficult even in principle to identify who is morally responsible for political outcomes.” The recent growth of ‘shared services’ arrangements for back-office and professional support functions is a case in point. Whereas public agencies once undertook HR tasks, legal advice, procurement activity and other support work in-house, partly following the decentralization and de-regulation trends of the new public management era (Peters, 1996), shared services break this single chain of command by distributing such activity across a plethora of different providers. Consequently, the “problem of many hands” has multiplied considerably. To understand the implications of this, our paper develops Lindkvist and Llewellyn’s conceptual distinction between ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’ (Llewellyn, 1998; 2003; also Llewellyn, 1998). Whereas much literature treats these concepts as synonymous, we show how they can operate independently from one another, and how recent efforts to address the accountability gap opened up by the shared services model can actually reduce responsibility for policy outcomes. We illustrate our arguments with new empirical data on the sharing of professional services in British Government.