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