Obtaining leverage was a particular challenge where services were delivered by bodies outside central government. In other words, government is a much disarticulated thing in which the centre's capacity to secure local outcomes is strictly limited. But woe betide ministers who cannot guarantee that people get equal treatment wherever they live. The Blair government is often accused of control-freakery and centralisation, so the latest report from Geoff Mulgan and colleagues in the performance and innovation unit is especially telling. They do not provide a neat answer to the question of how much to control from the centre.
Some central initiatives work.
Their key example is the literacy hour, introduced in primary schools in September 1998, insisting that whole classes worked on the same books, together with guided reading and writing in small groups. The annual national results and Ofsted's evaluations show that the literacy hour is working. Standards are up and the government is on track to achieve its 2002 target. The biggest impact so far has been on standards of reading. There are those who say that ultimately what mattered was that the primary schools got more money, but no one denies that without the initiative progress would have been slower.