Improving how Whitehall does its core business
Asking the general public for their views isn’t normally top of the to-do list in Whitehall. Of course it does have to happen, and there is a time-honoured process: green papers, white papers, calls for evidence and 12-week windows to respond. Times are, however, changing. Back in 2006, the then Labour administration launched the...
In June 2010 the Chancellor set up the Banking Commission, with Sir John Vickers as Chair, to solve the ‘too big to fail/too big to save’ conundrum while taking into account the need to maintain economic growth. They were given just over a year to prepare their report. The complex nature of banking regulation...
An optimistic start for the New Year – policies can work and governments can make a difference. Not a headline you would expect to see – but the subject of our new report. Success means that policies survive changes of government, become part of the status quo and the starting point for new policy....
This apparent hardening of attitudes is not unique to the UK, and appears to be part of a cross-national trend about how people think about poverty, fairness and who is best placed to do something about it. For example, across countries, people have become much more likely to agree that if someone works harder...
In 2009 the last government introduced “feed-in tariffs” – based on a German model – to boost domestic uptake of solar PV. They were quite controversial from the start – with passionate support from the green lobby but some dissenters – even Guardian columnist George Monbiot who pointed out last year that the very...
Transformation, the post-bureaucratic state, the Big Society – whichever title you use, a big rethink is now under way about how central Government operates. However, the soul-searching that is now engulfing the Civil Service has yet to affect ministers. Back in March, the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) produced a report Smaller Government: What...
Adopted child, college drop-out, phoenix businessman, global technology superstar – Steve Jobs is the latest incarnation of the American dream. But the interesting thing about Steve Jobs is how he broke many of the rules and succeeded magnificently because of it. The first rule of business is to focus on the customer. The Jobs...
Government accountability for policy mistakes rests on a series of ambiguities which can too easily turn into ‘who, not me’ evasions. Among many other lessons, the Public Accounts Committee’s damning report on the £469 million (minimum) waste on the now abandoned FiReControl project exposes one of the inherent flaws in the auditing of large-scale...
Speaking at the launch of the Mirrlees report, this week, IFS Director Paul Johnson mused on the fact that we had strategies for education, for health, indeed for much of public spending – but no British government had ever seen the need to produce a tax strategy. Tax matters. Not only do we need...
Most politicians’ books on policy tend to be predictable – particularly when written by ambitious young MPs with an eye on office like Tories’ Matthew Hancock and Nadhim Zahawi. Yet their account of the financial crisis, ‘Masters of Nothing: How the Crash Will Happen Again Unless We Understand Human Nature’, has many unexpected insights...
