Better policy making

In November 1996, the evening before the Budget, when I was Press Secretary at the Treasury, I had a phone call from No.10.  The Daily Mirror had a leaked copy of the Chancellor’s Budget speech.  They were planning to print. No.10 was trying to get an injunction – but we needed to make a...

In Australia, if there is a problem – what to do about the gambling industry; how to fund long term care for the aged; how to deal with scarce urban water – the Government’s answer is to ask its Productivity Commission to take a look.

10 years ago tomorrow – a Monday morning – a farm worker at an Essex abattoir noticed some pigs, held over from Friday’s shift, in obvious distress.

Two influential political commentators – Phil Collins of the Times who worked in No.10 under Tony Blair and Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer, documenter of the internal tensions of the last government, have recently opined on the current accident proneness of the government – whether on health, prisoners’ votes, school building or the forestry...

Last Friday the Chancellor launched the Treasury’s first on-line Budget portal. On the face of it, this appears to be taking democracy to a new level by opening up the closed budget process for public input. In fact, it is no more than the Treasury putting the existing budget representation process online – which...

Since the Institute published its MINDSPACE report in March, there has been an explosion of interest and activity around behavioural economics. Most notably, my co-author David Halpern now heads up a new Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office, which is tasked with ‘applying behavioural economics to policy in a systematic way’.

Government failure gets far more attention than government success, but British governments can point to a string of stunning policy triumphs in the past 30 years.

As part of our ‘Better policy-making’ project, we asked members of the Political Studies Association, academics working in the field of politics, what they thought had been the most successful policies of the last 30 years.

No speech about the importance of wellbeing can be made without citing Robert Kennedy’s famous denunciation of the folly of purely concentrating on economic growth . David Cameron’s announcement yesterday was no exception.

The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (PMSU) was created out of the merger of Performance and Innovation Unit, designed to challenge conventional policy-making form the centre, and the No.10 Forward Strategy Unit.