The Chancellor delivered this year’s Budget with a lot of shouting – but the sound and fury disguises the essentially dolittle nature of his proposals. The main, modest, changes he proposes mostly do not kick in for 2, 3 or 4 years, when most agree what we need is action now to kick-start the economy. […]

I have just created two new news feeds using the rather useful *Scoop.It*. One is a newsfeed counterpart to Whitehall Watch with all the news stories I come across that are worth reading if you are into *Whitehall Watching* and is called – surprisingly – Whitehall Watch: http://www.scoop.it/t/whitehall-watch The other is more narrowly around the topic […]

The Fabian Commission on Future Spending Choices asked me for some ideas about the public spending process in the UK and here are my suggestions for reform:

As some of you may know already, I am about to leave a Business School (MBS) and join a School of Social Sciences (Politics) (both at the University of Manchester, so not a big move in one sense). This may be unduly influencing my thinking, but the question I want to ask in this post […]

Su Maddock  @sumaddock Mid-Staffs Hospital is the tip of an iceberg that has been hiding neglect for many years. It is true poor practice was made worse by the target culture, but lets be honest –  abuse, neglect and poor care have a long history . It is not just the abuse that is horrific […]

I somewhat mischievously responded to a tweet from Chuka Umuna, the Labour shadow business secretary, that the reason that only 1.2% (7 out of 576) government infrastructure projects was ‘completed’ was because there was no-one left (in the civil service) to implement them. This was flippant, admittedly, but it is possibly not too far from […]

Both the parties that make up the current Coalition government had great fun at New Labour’s expense criticising their “target culture”. All that time-wasting, box-ticking, form-filling, behaviour-distorting, nonsense would be swept away if they were in power. How did that work out then?

In a previous post – Measuring Leviathan: Big Government and the Myths of Public Spending – I tried to explain and explore some of the mythology that has grown up around public spending and – probably more importantly – put forward some ideas about how we ought to think about public spending. I used the past 50 years or so […]

It’s couched in polite terms, but today the Public Administration Select Committee issued what amounted to a bruising attack on PM David Cameron. The PASC said the PM was wrong to ask the Cabinet Secretary to investigate the Andrew Mitchell ‘plebgate’ affair, wrong for not to using the Independent Advisor on Ministers’ Interests instead, and […]