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...
The call is certainly justified. Without high quality data on what departments are delivering and for how much it will be impossible to know whether Government’s ICT strategy is making any difference and few in the commentariat will be reassured that government has put behind it the calamities of the past. Fortunately, there are...
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...
Today, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report assessing the value for money of the Government’s new Work Programme. The programme, which pays private and voluntary sector providers for getting the long-term unemployed back into work, was rolled out across the country in June 2011, just a year after the Coalition Government took...
PASC has been running a fascinating series of inquiries focusing on leadership and change in Government, covering Civil Service reform, the role of the new Head of the Civil Service and a call for shrinking the number of ministers. Yesterday PASC published the Government’s response. There is some common ground and several valuable ‘wins’...
The battle over Scotland’s constitutional future stepped up a gear or three this week, with the UK Government declaring that a “legal, fair and decisive” independence referendum can be held only with explicit backing from Westminster. The SNP, unsurprisingly, demurs. A legal referendum? The Scotland Act of 1998 makes plain that the Scottish Parliament...
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....