From Birth to Death: The Life of the Standards Board for England

• Author: Michael Macaulay,Alan Lawton
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12712
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

720 Public Administration Review • September | October 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 720–729. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12712.

From Birth to Death:

The Life of the Standards Board for England

Michael Macaulay is director of the

Institute for Governance and Policy Studies

at Victoria University of Wellington, New

Zealand and member of the Australian

and New Zealand School of Government.

He is co-chair of the European Group

of Public Administration ’ s Permanent

Study Group on Quality and Integrity of

Governance and has worked with numerous

government agencies and nongovernmental

organizations, including the Open

Government Partnership, New Zealand

Police, United Nations Office on Drugs and

Crime, and Council of Europe.

E-mail: michael.macaulay@vuw.ac.nz

Alan Lawton is professor of

management at the Federation Business

School, Federation University Australia.

He has held professorial positions in the

United Kingdom and The Netherlands

and has published extensively on public

sector management and public sector

ethics. He has also carried out research

and consultancy projects on behalf of

Transparency International (UK), the United

Nations Development Programme, and

the European Union Phare Programme.

His current research interests include the

nature of ethical performance and ethical

turnaround.

E-mail: alan.lawton@federation.edu.au

Abstract : Organizations wax and wane, and some cease to exist altogether. The Standards Board for England was

abolished after a 10-year life. Created to regulate the ethical behavior of local politicians in England, the ethics of

politics was undermined by the politics of ethics. This article analyzes the life of the Standards Board initially through

the lens of a life-cycle approach to organizations but finds that a problem-cluster approach provides a sharper picture.

Over its lifetime, the Standards Board faced a number of crises; its failure to resolve these crises and an unfavorable

political climate led to its demise.

Practitioner Points

• Government agencies need to have clarity of purpose but recognize that adaptability to unstable external

environments is crucial.

• They also need acute political antennae to satisfy the demands of key external stakeholders.

• Organizations face problem clusters that constitute tipping points; how an organization deals with these

determines its future.

Alan Lawton

Federation University Australia, Australia

Michael Macaulay

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

T he Standards Board for England (SBE)

was established in 2001 as the national

investigatory body for ethics in English local

government. During its relatively brief (10-year)

history, it underwent significant change: in 2007, it

was transformed from an investigatory body into a

strategic “light-touch” regulator; its base of operations

was moved from London to Manchester; and it

oversaw a shift toward local ownership of ethical

regulation that perhaps foreshadowed its death. As a

result, its responsibilities changed to include support

and guidance to, and monitoring of, local authorities,

while its investigative activities were limited to

addressing only the most serious cases in which the

local standards committee believed that it was not

able to deal with the matter. This shift to a more

local ethics regime mirrored developments in which

central government was keen that local authorities

engage more with their local communities in a wide

range of policy areas. At the same time, in an era

of government fiscal constraint, a more localized

approach meant that the costs of regulation were

transferred to local authorities.

Although its reign was brief, the SBE proved to be a

rich source of research across a diverse range of topics

(Cowell, Downe, and Morgan 2011 , 2014 ; Lawton

and Macaulay 2004 , 2014 ; Lawton et al. 2005 ;

Macaulay and Lawton 2006 ; Macaulay, Newman,

and Hickey 2014 ), but little has been said about the

ways in which the organization morphed in terms of

its regulatory role and capacity. It is timely, therefore,

to take stock of the SBE, assess its trajectory, and map

the changes that it underwent against a background

of ethical regulation more generally. Our research

question is, what were the reasons for the demise of the

Standards Board, and what can ethics regulatory agencies

learn from that experience?

This article proposes to use the case of the SBE to

explore an organizational life cycle (OLC) for ethics

regulatory agencies, by which we mean agencies that

seek to regulate the unethical behavior of appointed

and elected public officials. We acknowledge that

OLCs are usually associated with private companies,

but we suggest that the SBE, at first glance, seems to

fit an OLC framework and offers myriad instances

with which to trace birth, growth, decline, and death

(Jones 2010 ).

Using an OLC framework, we will develop a more

general model for ethics regulatory agencies that will

look at the entry requirements for such agencies and

ways in which they can protect against organizational

fragility; the extent to which they can command

and shape their relative agendas so that they can

survive and prosper; their strategies for adapting to

changes in the external environment; how they deal