Louise Casey, the serial trouble-shooting Czarina, has managed to get huge publicity for a report which purports to “research” the issue of “troubled families”. And we’re not even into the Silly Season proper yet.

When the Coalition Government published its Spending Review in 2010 it ambitiously set out spending plans not for 3 years, as had been the case in the 5 previous Spending Reviews under New Labour, but for 4 years. This was always “ambitious Minister”, as Sir Humphrey would say.

Public policy community comes together 12 Jul 2012 The University of Manchester has established Policy@Manchester as a network bringing together a range of academics working in a variety of public policy areas.

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”.