Monthly Archives: October 2009

Joining the dots, by Michael O’Higgins

30 October 2009 | Michael O'Higgins

AXDA50Joined-up working, shared priorities, joint financing – was there ever a time when the Audit Commission, governments and countless other watchdogs and public bodies were not urging services to be more ‘joined up’? Read more...

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In at the deep end, by Mike Thatcher

30 October 2009 | Mike Thatcher

How can public sector budgets be cut without damaging service quality? This question will dog politicians from now until general election day and beyond. Read more...

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State of the unions, by Philip Johnston

30 October 2009 | Philip Johnston

When I started in journalism, working for a regional newspaper group in the early 1980s, we still used typewriters and gave copy to linotype operators to input even though the old hot metal machines had long gone. We also had computers but they were kept under wraps, literally, because the print unions would not let anyone use them. Read more...

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Never give up on a good thing, by Mick Fletcher

30 October 2009 | Mick Fletcher

The closer we get to the election – and to the inevitable period of public spending austerity – the louder the criticism of one of the schemes that has made a difference to disadvantaged households. Read more...

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Credit where it’s due, by Mike Mousdale

30 October 2009 | Mike Mousdale

When we talk about local authorities and banks in the same sentence, it is usually a bad news story. Most recently it was the Icelandic banks episode. Read more...

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Political pariahs? by Conor Ryan

29 October 2009 | Conor Ryan

MPs could be forgiven for thinking that they have officially been declared enemies of the people. After the public lynching engendered by the Daily Telegraph’s weeks of revelations before the summer, they now have to ensure the tortuous combination of Sir Christopher Kelly’s hairshirt and Sir Thomas Legg’s restrospective thumbscrew. Read more...

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Deep concerns over the FSA, by Phyllis Starkey

28 October 2009 | Phyllis Starkey

The communities and local government select committee today publishes the government’s and other official responses to our report published in June examining the framework for the investment of local authority reserves. This work was undertaken in the light of potential losses of up to £1bn in the failed Icelandic banks last year. Read more...

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A storm is coming, by James Close

27 October 2009 | James Close

‘This is no time for a novice.’ Gordon Brown’s jibe at Davids Cameron and Miliband at last year’s Labour conference was surely one of the better lines of his premiership. Read more...

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Up close and personal, by Demos

27 October 2009 | Jamie Bartlett

More ink has been spilled over the introduction of personal budgets than any reform in health and social care for a generation.  The dawning realisation that they are coming (within five years, around 1.5 million people could be using them) has meant that the rhetoric is being replaced by practical questions.  The most pressing of all is also the most obvious: what will people, when given a personal budget, want to spend their money on? Read more...

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Capital ideas, by Chris Leslie

26 October 2009 | Chris Leslie

They used to say that the national obsession was home property values, dominating middle-class dining table conversations up and down the country throughout the 1980s and 1990s. How things change. Today our media and politicians are discovering a new obsession; the collected anxieties about the escalating budget deficit and the state of our national debt. Read more...

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