Over the last year I have travelled around England’s greatest cities talking to more than sixty five business and voluntary sector leaders, local authority chief executives, journalists and councillors. The picture of city governance I have bought back is decidedly mixed; ranging from ambitious and strategic leadership to chaos and stagnation. Everywhere there was...
Adrian Brown posted an excellent and thought-provoking piece earlier this week on government’s inability to price, distribute and understand risk in its efforts to improve public services. In it, he cited this week’s SMF paper on risks to the viability of the Work Programme, and the Treasury Committee’s recent report on the poor value...
The Red Tape Challenge is in full swing. The Government is asking the public to come up with ideas for repeal or reform in areas as varied as Sunday Trading, consumer products, health and safety, road safety and equalities legislation. The website starts off with a defence of the importance of good regulation and...
Today, the Social Market Foundation (SMF) published a damning report on the government’s flagship Work Programme. Last week, the Treasury Select Committee was similarly scathing about the use of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts to pay for public infrastructure. The connection between the two is government’s apparent inability to successfully measure, price and share...
This latest form of democratic engagement was enabled by the Government’s new e-petitions website which went live 2 weeks ago. This democratic innovation allows any member of the public to create a new petition or support an existing petition for debate in the House of Commons. The site has enabled the public to call...
This is not so much whether the riots and their aftermath have been the biggest test the Prime Minister has faced since coming to office, which seems to be the view of most commentators, but rather what kind of leadership is required to deal with such events. This has achieved greater prominence following the...