What’s the role of finance at the centre of any complex sets of organisations? Sir Nick Macpherson recently set out a clear view in regard to the Treasury. It ‘sets the public expenditure totals,’ said the permanent secretary. It does not involve itself in ‘the efficiency improvements necessary to maintain services at a time...

I hate flying. And being maybe a little overly analytic, I find knowing as much as possible about how and why planes crash helps me relax. So I’m an avid fan to the ‘plane crash emergency’ shows on TV. They’ve all got a fixed structure. First the very real disaster of the crash itself,...

I’ve just returned from giving a seminar in Berlin to public servants from various European countries. They were eager for more details on the UK’s fiscal consolidation.

In 2006/07, I suspect very few people would have agreed that the government should: increase the share of our national income spent on pensioner benefits, the NHS and overseas aid through reduced spend on education, law and order, defence in the event of an unexpected recession, finance the interest on the debt through further reductions...

What we heard certainly had one key ingredient. It sketched out a long term future, one of the key requests emerging from our Citizen’s Jury work in July. There was an emphasis on growth, and ways to get there – particularly protecting science and education, which has strong echos of Sweden and Finland’s successful...

Up to now, the message from the Coalition government has largely been doom and gloom. However, in the last few days there have been a lot of ‘good news’ stories around the Spending Review, such as protecting schools and lesser than expected defence cuts.

The Institute set out its views on fiscal consolidation, alongside the IFS, in a briefing shortly after the election.  A vital element, based on the experience of countries like Canada and Sweden, is securing a public mandate.