For three decades the idea has held say in most of our political class that “Big Government” was inevitably hopeless and only markets, competition, choice and private provision – even of publicly paid for services – will ‘work’. If we ever needed reminding that life is not so simple the fiasco surrounding G4S – private […]

As someone who’s been writing and working with performance measures and dashboards for longer than I care to remember, I found this post on ‘False Economy’ (link below) just so funny I had to reproduce it…. ———————- A preview of our new iPad app: Cameron’s Dashboard

So, what is happening with Spending Review 2013 and is it going to happen at all? All sorts of rumours are flying about – in the absence of any clear statements from government.

I gave oral evidence to the ‘Accountability of Civil Servants’ inquiry today, which you can find out about here. You can see the evidence session here  And you can read my written submission here.

The first of what I hope will be many bits of information from ‘insiders’:

The Civil Service Reform Plan announced yesterday mostly rehashes old solutions, some sensible, others of dubious worth – but mostly renames stuff and proclaims it as if it was ‘new’. The cry of ‘cultural change’, for example, towards greater managerial responsibility and accountability has been repeated in Whitehall at least since Rayner and FMI, if […]

It is now a more or less open secret that the Coalition Government is engaged on Spending Review 2013 – a year earlier than if they had stuck to the SR 2010 “plan A”.

[Please circulate and respond to them – altho feel free to comment here too]. A session of the Royal Statistical Society’s conference early in September will address the question, ‘Have the government expenditure cutbacks undermined the statistical base in the UK?’.

Some very useful data compiled by Norman Flynn I thought it was worth sharing: —————–