As a field of practice, it reached its high point in the UK in the 1945-79 era of the welfare state, when the state was confidently expected to meet all the social and economic needs of the citizenry, “from the cradle to the grave” PA was to be the instrument of this brave new world, with the focus on administrative procedures to ensure equality of treatment. Predictably, perhaps such a vision was doomed to failure – public needs inevitably outstripped the public resources available to meet them. In the latter days of their hegemony both the welfare state and PA came under increasing fire – first from their academic critics (for example, Dunleavy 1985) and eventually from the political elite. Most damagingly, Chandler argued that PA had now entered terminal decline as a discipline, whilst Rhodes asserted that it had become a “bystander” to the practice of public policy implementation and public services delivery. This paved the way for the rise of the NPM