About Malcolm Prowle
Malcolm Prowle is professor of business performance at Nottingham Business School and a visiting research professor at the Open University Business School. Malcolm is an expert on the economics, finance and management of public services. He has advised ministers, senior civil servants and public service managers on a wide range of public policy and implementation issues
Structural reform is on the agenda for Welsh town halls, but we would be better off focusing on how to make existing arrangements work better through improvements in culture and management effectiveness Read more
Proposals for a private college charging tuition fees of £18,000 each year could radically alter the higher education sector over the long term Read more
Whatever the government says today in response to the Future Forum, the sad truth is that the NHS is unsustainable in its current form. But no political party will do what needs to be done for fear of the electorate’s reaction. Read more
The recently published report by the Work Foundation (see ‘Public sector should innovate instead of outsourcing‘) is to be welcomed, emphasising as it does the importance of the public sector carrying out its own innovations, rather than relying on the private sector to innovate through outsourcing. Read more
The news that Suffolk County Council has halted its controversial plans to outsource all its services after public opposition to spending cuts and a collapse in staff morale should come as no surprise. However, one might also question whether there was always something wrong about a policy that appears to see outsourcing as an ideological aim to be pursued in its own right rather than something that evolves from a market testing exercise concerned to establish the optimal approach to service provision. Read more...
The need for the NHS to make efficiency savings of £20bn to pay for growing demands for services will inevitably lead to cuts in existing staffing levels. That process is already generating the usual hysterical response from the usual quarters. Read more...
Once again the government has shown that it is completely out of touch with public concerns about university student finance. Firstly they failed to understand that, for many poor families, if something is called a ‘loan’ then they will see it as a loan however many times you try and persuade them it is some form of graduate tax. As such this is bound to impact on access to university for some poorer students. Read more...
The coalition government came to power with a flagship policy of reducing public spending and high levels of state borrowing but to achieve this they require reasonable levels of economic growth. Read more...
I have recently read Liaquat Ahamed’s excellent book on the history of the economic crisis after the First World War (Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression and the Bankers who Broke the World). Although the problems of the time are substantially different from those of today, there is a parallel, with orthodox methods being followed blindly with catastrophic consequences. Read more...
The Office for National Statistics today released figures on the performance of the UK economy in the last quarter of 2010, which showed a contraction of 0.5% following growth of 0.7% in the previous quarter. Read more...
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