PLANNING AND CONTROLLING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN THE UK, PART II: THE EFFECTS AND EFFECTIVENESS OF THE SURVEY

Part I of this article [spring 19921 examined and explained the processes by which the Treasury plans and controls public expenditure through the Public Expenditure Survey. This second part analyses the survey's effects and effectiveness. Throughout we assess the survey by the extent to which the principal functions of planning, allocating, controlling and evaluating public expenditure are articulated and performed. We use four sets of criteria. Firstly, the survey is assessed as a means of regulating the interdependent relationships of the principal participants. Secondly, as a system for making decisions about public expenditure, the survey is judged by the extent to which it has enabled governments to achieve their broad spending objectives. Thirdly, the survey is assessed b the extent to which it provides directly for the participation of ministers collectively in tie process of decision-making, and how they decide the relative priority of both the total of public expenditure and its composition. And fourthly, its effects are measured by analysing the outputs of the system - the allocation of spending to departments and agencies. In the concluding section we address directly the question of whose interests are best served by the survey.     

PERCEPTUAL DETERRENCE AMONG ACTIVE RESIDENTIAL BURGLARS: A RESEARCH NOTE*

The research reported here is based on a comparison of active residential burglars and a matched control group regarding their willingness to commit a burglary at varying levels of certainty of arrest, severity of penalty, and anticipated reward. Initial analyses revealed that few controls were willing to offend regardless of risk, penalty, or reward and that offenders were not influenced by penalty on its own. Consequently, responses of the offenders only were further analyzed in relation to the impact of risk, penalty, and reward. The results of a logit analysis indicated that both risk of being caught and prospect of increased gain had a significant influence on the offenders' decision making.     

Managing Future Liability At Petroleum Impacted Sites Through Proactive Strategic Environmental Baselining

An important consideration of any commercial and industrial property acquisition or divestiture—whether it is a single gasoline station or a suite of oil refineries—is the extant environmental conditions of the property(s) at the time of the transaction. Property sellers and prospective buyers each consider and negotiate how any existing or future liability associated with extant environmental conditions will be handled. In spite of this forethought and the agreed contract terms, future litigation over unanticipated environmental contamination remains a real possibility. Often precipitating future litigation are disagreements surrounding whether “newly realized” contamination is old (pre-sale) or new (post-sale). As a result, environmental forensic investigations are often faced with the issue of “age-dating” this newly discovered contamination in order to determine whether it was released pre- or post-sale. Age-dating contamination can be an inherently difficult task to perform and technically defend. Technical arguments between experts can be short-circuited if there was an irrefutable understanding of the nature of extant contamination that had existed at the time of the sale. Conventional environmental due diligence investigations (Phase I and II site assessments) fall short of providing this understanding. In this paper, we discuss Strategic environmental baselining (SEB), a cost-effective and pro-active form of environmental due diligence that incorporates a key component of environmental forensics, that is, advanced chemical fingerprinting using modified EPA Methods that are tailored for hydrocarbon fingerprinting. Sufficient sampling and advanced chemical fingerprinting performed at the time of a transaction (or, at least, properly archived samples analyzed in the future as needed) provides the evidence that eliminates the need to “age-date” contamination at some future date. Advanced chemical fingerprinting data also provides detailed characteristics of the extant contamination and thereby, helps distinguish “old” from “new” contamination, regardless of alteration of the chemicals of concern by weathering. Armed with this information both buyers and/or sellers can protect themselves in the event of any future claim(s).     

POLICY EVALUATION: INCORPORATING USERS’VIEWS

There is a growing recognition that obtaining feedback from users is a fundamental and integral part of measuring effectiveness and without such a perspective, policy evaluation will have limited legitimacy. There is still, however, widespread uncertainty about how best to carry this out or in what circumstances, given methodological and other constraints, such an approach is likely to be worthwhile. The aim of this article is not to rehearse in detail the merits and demerits of users as stakeholders, thereby providing a rationale for their inclusion in the evaluation process. This has been adequately covered elsewhere despite the subsequent paucity of empirical studies seeking to incorporate user perspectives. Rather, it is an attempt to suggest a set of co-requisites which would provide some guidance to would-be evaluators as to those conditions in which incorporation of user perspectives will be both methodologically sound and practically useful. In so doing, it suggests a referential rather than just an exclusively schematic approach to evaluation. It is hoped that the insights provided by the case studies described in the article will help those involved in evaluations to more quickly vet or validate desiderata in which inclusions of this stakeholder's group is desirable, expedient, permissible and authoritative.     

PROTECTING PRIVACY ACROSS BORDERS: EUROPEAN POLICIES AND PROSPECTS

This article discusses the attempt to create a system governing the use of personal data within the European Community (EC) and between it and other countries. First, the main issues involved in data protection are reviewed, and the background to current developments in international standard-setting activity is traced. The factors that affect the possibility of harmonization are then examined, and the ability of the EC to establish further convergence in data protection policy is commented upon. It is argued that, while there continue to be notable strides towards a convergence of statutory principles, of scope, and of the powers of regulatory instruments, there will remain significant obstacles to the convergence of practice.