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	<title>Blog &#187; Julian McCrae</title>
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		<title>The dull bits of avoiding plane and political crashes</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3840/the-dull-bits-of-avoiding-planepolitical-crashes/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/3840/the-dull-bits-of-avoiding-planepolitical-crashes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:45:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 &#8216;plane crash emergency&#8217; shows on TV. They’ve all got a fixed structure. First the very real disaster of the crash itself, with the emotional accounts of those involved. They then move on the forensic investigation of the facts – who did or said what, how exactly did a system fail. The final 10 minutes are the dull bit, when a change is made to the training programme, or a checklist introduced. Dull but vital if you’re interested in heading off the underlying causes of crashes. This structure may be worth bearing in mind when trying to think constructively about the evidence sessions of the Home Affairs select committee earlier this week. We are now locked into a real drama, which will have an emotional impact on all the people caught up in it. There will be a focus on the minute analysis of exactly who said what at which meeting. I doubt there will ever be much that an Institute for Government can contribute to these proceedings. [...]]]></description>
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		<title>The fiscal squeeze: now it gets real</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/2290/the-fiscal-squeeze-now-it-gets-real/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/2290/the-fiscal-squeeze-now-it-gets-real/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:38:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[A more effective Whitehall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Public Services]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=2290</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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. When you tell our international friends that the UK is, for example, taking 20+% out of our law and order budget, a regular response is that &#8220;we are doing the same – a 10/20/30% reduction in the administration costs of our police&#8221;. It takes a little while for the penny to drop that our 20+% applies to the whole budget – administration, police pay, running costs of prisons, etc. The next question is invariably &#8220;do you really think the UK can achieve that?&#8221; Where it depends on political capital This is, of course, a question whose answer is automatically &#8220;it depends&#8221;.  The challenge has many elements. Many of the tax rises have already come in, with more due next week. But the almost 80% of our consolidation that comes from spending reductions is only just beginning. Many welfare cuts come into effect today. Further reductions in subsidy regimes will take longer – for example university teaching grants fall in 2012-13 (with the income to be replaced by tuition fees), while legal aid reductions are [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>The changing structure of public spending – accident or design?</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/965/the-changing-structure-of-public-spending-%e2%80%93-accident-or-design/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/965/the-changing-structure-of-public-spending-%e2%80%93-accident-or-design/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:18:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fiscal consolidation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending review]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[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 in these same areas. However, this is exactly what the Coalition government has done. How state spending is shifting The last government’s decision to stick to the fixed cash spending plans that emerged from the 2007 spending review, together with the (explicit and implicit) ringfences in last month’s spending review, have changed the structure of public spending. I&#8217;ve been playing with the numbers and have now got some figures to illustrate the effect. Commentators have focused on the scale of reductions implied by the Spending Review. But expected spend as share of GDP in 2014-15 (41.0%) is almost identical to actual spend in 2006-7 before the recession (40.8%). But what this disguises is a big shift in what we spend our money on: on the way into the recession, sticking to the cash plans meant big effective increases in spend, with health, education and benefit recipients as big [...]]]></description>
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		<title>What to make of the Spending Review speech?</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/894/what-to-make-of-the-spending-review-speech/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/894/what-to-make-of-the-spending-review-speech/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:50:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fiscal consolidation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending review]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=894</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What we heard certainly had one key ingredient. It sketched out a long term future, one of the key requests emerging from our Citizen&#8217;s Jury work in July. There was an emphasis on growth, and ways to get there &#8211; particularly protecting science and education, which has strong echos of Sweden and Finland&#8217;s successful deficit reductions in the 1990s. And the Chancellor spoke a lot about cutting the things the public instinctively do not like. So whenever we got a confirmation of another departmental budget being cut, the effects were discussed in terms of eliminating waste, cutting inflated cost bases, etc. Nobody wants their taxes spent on such things, so such measures are a key theme of the &#8220;achieving fairness through tackling unfairness&#8221; chapter of the handbook. But was this over done? Transparency is important for successful deficit reductions.  As I’ve blogged before, people will be facing the real pain of cuts on this scale for themselves in the near future. The handbook would emphasise the need to be upfront about all the consequences. Was there enough about what the cuts in, say, law and order budgets or the reductions for local councils might really mean in practice? And now [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Spending Review: can transparency trump temptation?</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/871/spending-review-can-transparency-trump-temptation/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/871/spending-review-can-transparency-trump-temptation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:33:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fiscal consolidation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Transparency]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=871</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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 &#8216;good news&#8217; stories around the Spending Review, such as protecting schools and lesser than expected defence cuts. Do these stories reflect the reality of the government&#8217;s plans, or are they just a way to get some more positive headlines around a very difficult announcement? ‘Gordon counting’: Labour’s first spending review It is fairly straightforward for government to make numbers look better than the underlying reality. I was amused to hear Evan Davis taking Nick Clegg to task on the Today Programme last week. As Evan pointed out, the £7bn extra spending Nick was talking about was really the adding up of numbers over years. The per year total of extra spending turned out to be nearer to £3bn per year. This particular trick became notorious in Labour&#8217;s first Spending Review, and was christened &#8216;Gordon counting&#8217; at the time – making spending increases seem many times larger than they actually were. Labour came to regret the presentation of that spending review. The view was that, by making small increases sound large, the government had over-promised.  [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Why fairness matters when the cuts begin to bite</title>
		<link>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/322/why-fairness-matters-when-the-cuts-begin-to-bite/?source=rss</link>
		<comments>http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/322/why-fairness-matters-when-the-cuts-begin-to-bite/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:37:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Julian McCrae</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Parliament and the political process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuts]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/?p=322</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[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. This is not about trying to get people out campaigning for cuts.  Rather the two parts are that the public have to accept at a basic level that action is necessary, and that the particular actions of the government are guided by an underlying sense of fairness. Where are we on establishing these elements of a successful consolidation?  The insights from a three and a half days Citizens’ Jury event in Coventry, convened by Price Waterhouse Coopers, where 24 members of the public were asked to do their own consolidation process provide an intriguing set of lessons for Whitehall. Two important headlines stand out. Firstly, people can accept the case for difficult decisions when they are engaged in a meaningful discussion about the options. Secondly, fairness was a very important concept to the jury, who had a remarkably clear idea of what fairness meant to them and how they expected to see that play out through the consolidation process. So the starting point [...]]]></description>
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