See my comment for Public Finance on “The Five States We’re In”

by Davy Jones 15 April 2011 The Introduction to the Government’s new Best Value: new draft statutory guidance announces the repeal of two statutory duties on local authorities: the duty to involve, and the duty to prepare a sustainable community strategy. This is explained as reducing “red tape” for local authorities.

Whitehall Watch has been more successful, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than I ever imagined when I started it up just over two years ago now. But it has been almost entirely a “one man band” and I’ve been trying to think of ways of changing that….

[This post is being updated as more information arrives, so please check back]. A friend and colleague at the University of Malawi (Chancellor College) has just sent this somewhat hair-raising account of a developing attack on academic freedom there:

Here’s a simple question about the NHS reforms – who’s going to count the beans? Bean counting gets a bad press, but as soon as someone fails to count the public sector beans – for which read “the taxpayers money” – properly all hell breaks loose.

When the LSE set up their controversial programme of training civil servants in Libya the person they negotiated the contract with was a Dr Mahmoud Jebril, who was then the DG of the National Development Board. At today’s Conference in London on the Future of Libya the Transitional Government (i.e. the rebels) was represented by, […]

I did the above on Sunday as a studio guest – if anyone’s interested you can find it on the BBC iPlayer here – it starts about half way through the NW segment.

Attacks on the Civil Service are nothing new. But when they come form a new government less than a year in office, something strange is happening.

As I predicted, the 2011 Budget has stuck rigidly to the public spending plans set out in the Spending Review 2010, including spending on services and capital spending.