Today, The Equality Trust released its second quarterly Research Digest – a review of what the wider academic literature is saying about income inequality and its effects.  

Some of you may be aware that the highly successful, and influential, Huffington Post news website is launching a UK version next week. I am delighted to have been asked to join their list of regular contributors. My first contribution – about the difference between the UK and USA when it comes to researching and […]

see my comment over on the Guardian Public Leaders Network

David Cameron and his Lib Dem allies keep telling us that public sector pensions are “unaffordable”. A pity then that the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC), but Coalition MPs are in a majority, seems to think this is nonsense. In a report issued last month, the say the public sector pensions problem has already been […]

An excellent analysis over @ flipchartfairlytales which shows that the root of the Greek crisis is the failure of tax collection and the size of the shadow economy. My comment was:

David Cameron’s remark that he sometimes felt like saying to our military chiefs “you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking” has raised some interesting issues.

Back in November 2010, and again in January 2011, I made said that the Universal Credit reforms had insanely tight timescales for implementation, especially given the scale and complexity of the IT developments necessary to make it work – you can read the original posts here: Welfare Reform: It’s the Implementation, Stupid and Great Train Wreck of 2013. And […]

Jill Sherman reports in today’s The Times (16 June 2011) that the Coalition government’s long delayed public service reform White Paper has been delayed, again.

The NHS has traditionally been organized, like most public services, on the basis of place. This has been both a control and a planning mechanism. It is a planning mechanism because it uses available information about the demographic and health profile of an area and seeks to match provision to need. It is also a […]

It is widely recognised, and mostly accepted, that ‘utilities’ provide a public service and not just private services, so it is legitimate to regulate them in ways that ensure the public interest. This is partly because there are always elements of natural monopoly in the way in which these services – power, water, fixed line […]