Treasury guidance used to judge the value for money of Private Finance Initiative schemes is to be reformed in a drive to ensure 'more robust' government spending decisions.
As industrial action by council workers, train drivers and firefighters escalates are we witnessing a new era of union militancy that echoes the 1979 'winter of discontent'?
Whitehall departments that benefited from Gordon Brown's largesse in Monday's long-awaited Spending Review will be expected to meet 'demanding' national targets.
For all its words about devolution of control, the government effectively tightened its grip on education in the Spending Review, outlining a new blueprint for secondary schools that will explicitly...
Local authorities are in line for an average increase of 4.2% in central grant over the next three years, prompting accusations that local services are being pushed to the back of the spending queue.
Nick Raynsford has revealed a talent for nifty conjuring tricks in his proposals for reforming the notoriously complex Standard Spending Assessment, the method by which authorities receive their...
The Spending Review has confirmed what many expected: large increases in resources for many public services. The Budget had already told us how far the overall spending envelope would grow, and laid...
The National Audit Office is calling on Welsh NHS trusts to speed up the sale of surplus assets after inspectors found they took on average 50% longer than their English counterparts.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has laid out his vision of a Britain free from racial prejudice and described the country as an open nation 'enriched by immigration'.
There may have been relief when the draft Local Government Bill published with requisite fanfare by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott last week finally emerged.
Walsall Borough Council is almost certain to be the second authority to suffer direct takeover by the government after an Audit Commission report this week castigated its continuing financial...
The government is 'not hostile' to the idea of a local income tax and will shortly set up a high-level working group to examine the balance of local authority funding, the Treasury's chief economic...
Central government must give councils a 'level playing field' in how they finance capital projects and stop forcing them to use the Private Finance Initiative, according to an expert panel.
The number of elderly people being readmitted to hospital soon after discharge has risen sharply and measures designed to ease NHS bedblocking could make matters even worse.
Councils hoping to establish a better system for funding education authorities have failed to endorse a new model for redistributing the available money.
Public Service Agreements should be expanded to cover the proposed regional assemblies, to give them more freedom to target resources at regional priorities, England's most senior local government...