Modern and personalised social care services will not emerge unless councils offer innovative businesses a secure return on their investment, a report from the Commission for Social Care Inspection...
& nothing gained. Or so say the growing army of private equity investors in public services and assets. Paul Gosling explores the pros and cons of such partnerships for the public sector
The government has made slow progress against its target to clear a backlog of 450,000 asylum seekers' case files despite a five-year plan introduced last summer, the chief executive of the Border...
Residents' satisfaction with services and value for money should be the yardsticks against which local authorities are measured when Comprehensive Area Assessments are introduced in 2009, according...
Northern Ireland's hospitals spend £31m more a year than they need to, compared with the unit costs of their English NHS equivalents, according to reviews conducted for Northern Ireland's Department...
The scaling down of Public Service Agreements has been heralded as emblematic of a less centralist approach to performance management. But details of the new delivery agreements suggest otherwise
New Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain has thrown down the gauntlet in a green paper designed to get the long-term unemployed into jobs. But, as Mark Conrad reports, there are some tricky battles...
Scotland's public sector watchdog has criticised the NHS and councils over a lack of information about the costs of providing care for people with long-term conditions.
MPs and peers have called for a thorough reform of NHS regulations, equality guidance and human rights law to counter the abuse of older people in hospitals and care homes.
NHS foundation trusts have been accused of circumventing the cap Parliament imposed on their private patient work by establishing arm's-length bodies whose income does not show up in their accounts.
Northern Ireland's Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety is to clamp down on the fraudulent use of its health service by Irish Republic residents.
Voluntary sector involvement in public service delivery is blighted by poor commissioning and perceived conflicts with European Union competition rules, the Audit Commission has found.
Britain's 'stunningly complex' benefits system has fuelled the rising payment error rates that this week led auditors to qualify the Department for Work and Pensions' accounts for the eighteenth...
Health Secretary Alan Johnson pledged to improve the convenience and accessibility of GP care this week, after it emerged that patients in deprived areas and those from ethnic minorities were the...
Business leaders have warned that the private sector is receiving mixed signals from the Department of Health over the future role it can play in the NHS.
In the early days of New Labour, the Private Finance Initiative was seen as the only game in town for funding major public sector projects, but the Metronet crisis could mean the game is up, writes...
Patients attending independent sector treatment centres are safe, but it is impossible to say how their care compares with the NHS as the centres systematically fail to provide the relevant data, the...
The chief medical officer for England and Wales, Sir Liam Donaldson, has used his annual report to call for 'raided' public health funds to be restored.
