We were promised as part of the new politics of the new Coalition government that everything would be much more transparent. Some of this supposed new transparency is proving comical, even farcical, in nature. Publishing the COINS database of itemised government spending, for example, is mildly interesting but to anyone but a researcher largely irrelevant […]

Free schools are not, and cannot be, “free”. They certainly won’t be free in a financial sense. The tax payer will be paying for them. All tax payers, not just the few who currently send their kids there, or may wish to do so in the future. That includes all the taxpayers who send their […]

The June 22 Budget will herald major spending cuts to tackle the country’s debt crisis. But there is also a wider strategic goal, and it’s called rolling back the ‘Big State’ We are edging, slowly and hesitatingly, towards the sort of debate about the future of Britain that should have happened during the general election, […]

It was US President Harry Truman who reportedly said that he was fed-up with economists who told him “one the one hand Mr President…”, followed by “but on the other hand….”. Truman said he wanted a one-armed economist.

One of the new Commandments is “Thou shalt not accumulate public debts that have to paid off by future generations”. To which I answer, why not? Like most such axioms, any serious analysis soon shows that the Commandment isn’t quite as absolute, or a useful guide to action, as it first appears.

So, now we know the ‘how’ if not yet the ‘what’ of the cuts in public spending. “The Spending Review Framework” (Cm 7872) published June 8th sets out how the radical new Spending Review will operate, and it’s rather similar to the old one introduced by Labour in 1998.

One of the interesting processes going on at the moment is the election of chairs of select committees in Parliament, and then the members of the committees themselves.

The current debates about so-called ‘free’ schools remind me of an incident more than a decade ago which was somewhat seared into my memory.

So – apparently I have been to Atlantis. And there was me thinking I was just going on a short holiday to somewhere warm, sunny and quiet….. Please indulge this post, which has little to do with Whitehall or even public management, but I just wanted to share.

The most obvious thing about today’s £6.2bn worth of cuts is the degree to which Whitehall departments have successfully ‘passed the parcel’ onto other parts of public services: local and devolved government, quangos, universities, private sector contractors and suppliers, and others will take the bulk of the pain.