Just a quick note: Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has just let slip on BBC that there will be a Spending Review “over the next year or so” (i.e. SR 2013) as i have been predicting for some time. More on this shortly.

The issue of Ministers’ interest came to the fore with the Liam Fox/Adam Werrity affair last year. Today the Public Administration Select Committee passed judgement on the role of the supposedly “independent adviser” to the PM on the issue. It is not positive – here’s the Committee’s Press release: 

  Three decades ago two American academics published a superb analysis of the way in which British government’s made finance decisions provocatively entitled “The Private Government of Public Money” (Heclo and Wildavsky, 1981). Has the Coalition accidentally given birth to the ‘Public Government of Public Money?’

Localising, or regionalising, public sector pay has been a long dream of HM Treasury. But there are reasons it has never been realised, reasons that still militate against it happening in practice, whatever Mr Osborne decrees from the centre.

I received the following comment from a serving civil servant who wishes to remain anonymous. I publish it here (with their consent) and add a comment of my own at the end: ——– Although a civil servant I have some sympathy with Margaret Hodge in the recent debates over accountability; although the principle of civil […]

A civil service colleague wrote to me following my previous post about Civil Service accountability, pointing out the role of the ‘Civil Service Code’ in their accountability. He was of course correct to point this out, but the ‘Code’ does not actually go as far as the ‘Armstrong Doctrine’ or the ‘Osmotherly Rules’ I talked […]

The whole NHS reform is based on an assertion – that GPs are somehow better placed to decide what NHS services need to be provided because they are in some sense ”closer to patients”. The news story today that GPs seem to be failing to provide adequate services to elderly people in care homes raises […]

Is the Civil Service accountable to parliament? Margaret Hodge MP, the formidable chair of the powerful Public Accounts Committee of Parliament says “yes”. Sir (now Lord) Gus O’Donnell and other ex-Mandarins say firmly “no”. (For details see the Guardian website here). Ironically, emerging in the week that Norman St John-Stevas (Baron St John of Fawsley) died, […]

Britain has always had a fairly weak system for correcting public administration injustices when compared to many other countries, where there are much more formal systems. More than half a million complaints have to be addressed every year through a myriad of different systems. The only body that has oversight of this lumbering edifice is […]