About Ian Mulheirn
Ian Mulheirn has been director of the Social Market Foundation since 2008. He is a former economic advisor at HM Treasury where he worked on child poverty, savings & investment, welfare to work and higher education funding. Ian is currently a specialist advisor to the House of Commons work and pensions select committee.
The deputy prime minister’s plan to raise personal allowances is a very expensive way to help the ‘squeezed middle’. There must be a better approach Read more
The chancellor’s credit easing plan is basically borrowing to boost the economy. Is this a sensible approach or would infrastructure spending be a better alternative? Read more
The ‘credit easing’ announced by the chancellor could help businesses and inject more cash into the economy. So is this still plan A? Read more
Just how viable is the government’s scheme to get the long-term jobless back into work? Read more
Pensions have become a key battleground between government and public sector workers. Ian Mulheirn puts forward the case for a pay and pensions body to depoliticise the issue Read more...
Despite the welcome sentiments of the Open Public Services white paper, it’s easy for the strategy to get derailed by failing to address the supply side issues Read more
Competition is meant to underpin the government’s public service reforms. But ministers are running scared of the c-word Read more
It looks increasingly like the momentum of the coalition’s reform agenda has been lost. With flagship health reforms in the midst of their ‘pause for reflection’, other signs also indicate that the coalition’s blitzkrieg of reform has become bogged-down, possibly to go into reverse. Read more...
The long awaited interim report from the Independent Commission on Banking is out. Sir John Vickers and his wise band of commissioners have sought to resolve a key structural problem in the banking system that was one of the causes of the crisis: that the investment arms of universal banks were able to take large risks with money borrowed cheaply on the back of state-backed retail deposits from the likes of you and me. When the roof fell in it was the taxpayer, rather than other creditors of the banks, who took the hit. Read more...
David Cameron ruffled more than a few feathers at the Conservative spring conference in Cardiff in March by identifying civil servants as the ‘enemies of enterprise’. For many politicians, bureaucrat bashing is much easier than banker bashing – after all, civil servants are unlikely to move to Geneva as a result of the political opprobrium heaped upon them. Read more...
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