Posts tagged with ‘ Transparency ’

The headline grabber inevitably centres around the Prime Minister’s judgement. There are however other important issues which this has highlighted. These are about the processes for senior ‘political’ appointments which come within the purview of Prime Ministers but which involve people who work at the heart of government. The current system is pretty opaque....

If we’ve learnt one thing from the Government’s faltering attempts to radically reform the NHS, it’s that nobody likes surprises. The Coalition failed to fully test its reforms with policymakers and professionals, resulting in public and practitioner resistance that led to the plans being first delayed, then substantially revised. So it must surely be...

The quote serves as a reminder that over the last 30 years public service reform has been underpinned by some common, perhaps clichéd themes. Successive governments have repeatedly told us they will make public services more ‘citizen centric’, will ‘open up government’ and provide more ‘choice’ for service users. So is Cameron’s promise  to...

Ed Miliband must have breathed a sigh of relief when the Parliamentary Labour Party endorsed his plans to end elections to the Shadow Cabinet even though he still has to get them through the party conference in the autumn. Having personal control as Leader over the composition of the shadow team would strike most...

Ipsos Mori’s Veracity Index (commissioned intriguingly by the British Medical Association) yet again shows that doctors and teachers top the net trust ratings at +80% and + 69% respectively (calculated as the difference between people saying they trust the group to tell the truth and they don’t) – perhaps illustrating the problems for the...

Published discretely alongside the refreshed departmental business plans was a dull but incredibly important annex (PDF, 431KB) that set out a line-by-line audit trail of changes to the original business plans. For each change the original action is listed alongside the new text and, crucially, an account of why the changes had been made.

The Draft Cabinet Manual’s 148 pages cover everything  from the role of the Sovereign – placed first ahead of elections — to the roles of the Cabinet, Parliament, the civil service and the law, and relations with the devolved institutions.

David Cameron launched today what he called a “power shift” from Whitehall to individuals and local communities. Behind the 30 to 40 page Business Plans announced by each department lies an attempt to answer a perennial question: how to push through, and sustain, a programme of reform?

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 ‘good news’ stories around the Spending Review, such as protecting schools and lesser than expected defence cuts.

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist reportedly said that “anyone who isn’t shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” And so it is with the Big Society.