A Conservative government is unlikely to meet Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to deliver a surplus by 2018/19, the Social Market Foundation warned in its pre-Autumn Statement briefing.
Monitor has urged NHS foundation trusts to improve control of their contract and agency staffing costs after finding that they had spent double what they planned between April and September.
The next Labour government would look to raise as much as £100m by selling off state-owned property in London, including restaurants and the QE2 Conference Centre, the party has announced.
Public sector borrowing between April to October this year rose £3.7bn compared to the same period the previous year, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics.
High Speed 2 rail chief Sir David Higgins has raised the prospect of increased private investment in the UK’s transport system, as part of a 30-year government plan to develop economically vital...
The government has succeeded in cutting spending on civil legal aid following reforms to provision, but it is not clear whether the changes have also been effective in targeting support to those who...
The Department for Communities and Local Government must improve efforts to monitor the effect of councils’ funding cuts on the ground, the National Audit Office has said.
George Osborne has embarked on a tour of the country to find out what areas could benefit from additional funding for road improvements in next month’s Autumn Statement.
A quirk in the Barnett Formula for determining the public spending share of the UK’s constituent nations has spared Scotland £600m of cuts since the UK coalition’s austerity programme began in 2010,...
Early plans to integrate local health and social care services through the Better Care Fund are ‘inadequate’ and fail to match the scale of its ambition, the National Audit Office warned today.
Business leaders are urging the government to boost the living standards of low earners by raising the National Insurance threshold and expanding the provision of free childcare and maternity pay.
MPs have called on the government to produce a clear ‘map of state’ setting out the roles and responsibilities of quangos and agencies, after finding that the current arrangements lacked clarity.
Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles is to send three commissioners into Tower Hamlets to oversee the work of the authority after an inspection by PricewaterhouseCoopers found it had failed to...
Care minister Norman Lamb has revealed that an expanded version of the government’s flagship Better Care Fund will be the likely mechanism to fully integrate health and care spending across the...
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that nearly all of the 151 Better Care Fund plans in England have been approved ahead of implementation of the reform from next April.
Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge has called for a tougher tax regime that closes loopholes exploited by companies and prosecutes avoidance schemes.
Central government and local authorities do not tackle underperformance in academies and maintained schools consistently, according to the National Audit Office.
The next government should set a fiscal rule to ensure that total public spending does not exceed tax revenue once the existing deficit is closed, the CBI has said.
The Home Office has failed to get to grips with the backlog of applications for asylum since Home Secretary Theresa May abolished the UK Border Agency and took the work in-house, MPs have said today.
The government plans to claw back redundancy payments from NHS and council managers who return to work in the same sector within a year, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has announced.
