Lord O’Donnell, former head of the civil service, has put forward some ideas for better scrutiny of proposed government policies. According to a report in Civil Service World: Among ideas to prevent “bad policies” from being introduced, [O’Donnell] said a new Office of Taxpayer Responsibility (OTR) should assess policies, requiring the government to specify their […]

UKIPs undoubtedly successful showing in the (mostly) English local elections has left many analysts speculating over whether this is a sustainable political shift to “four party” politics or not?

We are organising a series of debates and discussions about how Britain manages public money.

So, it is now official, we are going to have Spending Review 2013. First, let’s clear up some confusions – as far as we can – about where SR2013 “fits”.

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 […]