Hospital workers in Dudley have launched a fifth round of industrial action in protest against plans to outsource staff in an £88m Private Finance Initiative project.
Health Secretary Alan Milburn ushered Best Value into the NHS last week, abandoning almost two decades of compulsory market testing in support services such as cleaning and catering.
Management's annual conference in Harrogate that Michael Portillo's proposal to boost overall health care spending by removing taxes on private health insurance 'shattered the postwar consensus on...
The chief executive of the King's Fund has issued a stern warning to Tony Blair and the government to give full and enthusiastic support to the public services. Otherwise, says Rabbi Julia Neuberger...
Child support services are close to collapse in the Vale of Glamorgan, according to a report on the council's social services described by one Whitehall official as 'the most damning we have produced...
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott is being strongly tipped in Whitehall for the ill-fated post of 'Cabinet enforcer' if Tony Blair wins a second term in government.
Scottish Permanent Secretary Muir Russell has challenged arguments by auditor general Bob Black which dispute the former Scottish Office's choice of a construction management contract system for the...
Tony Blair's plan to give everyone access to NHS dentistry by September 2001 will fail unless more cash is found, the British Dental Association said this week.
The former Scottish Office failed to prepare a comprehensive procurement strategy when it began preparations for a new building for the Scottish Parliament, auditor general Bob Black said this week.
Housing association rents should not be kept artificially high so that registered social landlords can fund activities linked to neighbourhood renewal, housing minister Nick Raynsford warned this...
Local authorities were trying to pick up the pieces of disrupted services as fuel began to trickle slowly back into garages and council depots after the government's ultimatum to petrol companies to...
The government's hospital building programme is ill-considered and could create expensive white elephants, a King's Fund report said this week, in yet another condemnation of Private Finance...
The Conservatives' opening shots in the coming election campaign, featuring radical plans for change in education and local government, have been greeted with predictably swingeing criticism from...
The public sector has a serious image problem which is discouraging young people from seeing it as a worthwhile career and creating a recruitment crisis, according to the chief executive of the King'...
Public, private and voluntary organisations are to work with 345 schools on out-of-hours educational projects for which funding was announced this week.
Just weeks after publication of the NHS National Plan, finance staff are being given the first glimpse of what the future holds for them in a modernised NHS.
The government is to launch a quality strategy for social workers in a bid to raise standards and challenge the negative stereotypes that dog the profession.
Council social services departments' inability to cope with demand could plunge the NHS into another winter crisis, health authorities and trusts said this week.
The government scrambled to rebuff mounting criticism of its flagship New Deal scheme this week, after claims that it had made little impact on the labour market and that even its own departments...
The Blair government's determination to downgrade local authorities in favour of control from Whitehall has been likened to Soviet-style centralist rule by the leader of the Local Government...
