Search Results for: devo

This week saw an extraordinary outburst from the most recently retired Head of the Civil Service, Lord Gus O’Donnell. He said, on the BBC, “”When governments go through difficult patches you are looking for who you can blame. The issue comes up of ‘well, let’s try and blame the Civil Service’. It does not usually […]

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 […]

Dame Helen Ghosh DCB is, I’m sure, a very fine civil servant in may ways, but sensitive to others perspectives she’s clearly not. Speaking at the NAO Conference on Performance yesterday (22 Feb 2012) Dame Helen was explaining how the Home office was attempting to devolve more powers to police forces, when she came up […]

I reprint below an excellent briefing by Professor Allyson Pollock and colleagues on key clauses of the Health and Social Care Bill. It addresses two critical issues: The removal of  legal responsibility from the Secretary of State to prove health services and The confusing mixture of ‘person-based’ and ‘area-based’ arrangements for patients (and consequently funding […]

From the Financial Times Minimum wage rated top policy, say academics By Nicholas Timmins, Public Policy Editor Published: May 1 2011 What is the most successful policy of the past 30 years? Ask a bunch of political academics and their answer – perhaps surprisingly – is the minimum wage, followed by devolution, privatisation and the […]

Today’s report from the Public Administration Select Committee (see here and Press Release reproduced below) makes complete sense. It argues that as Ministers reduce the size of the House of Commons (from 650 down to 600 MPs) and devolve power (allegedly) away from Whitehall, there should be less need for so many Ministers and their […]

Andy Coulson may have gone, but the evidence of the spin-s dark arts at work permeates the Coalition government’s strategy. Before the election both Tories and Liberal Democrats made much of the fact they were going to be open and honest with voters about the effects of the cuts they were proposing (as opposed to […]

A colleague in local government tells me that I missed the front-loading of the local government cuts in SR2010.

If there is one word that sums up yesterday’s Spending Review it is insecurity. Today Britain is a much less secure place to be than it was yesterday, nationally, socially and individually. And by the time the Spending Review is implemented in full we will all be feeling much less secure – we really will […]

Next week at 12.30 GMT Chancellor George Osborne will rise in the House of Commons to present his Comprehensive Spending Review 2010. This will set out Departmental Spending Limits (DEL) for the fiscal years 2011-12 to 2014-15, and probably a lot more besides. What should we, and should we not, be looking for in CSR […]