The public sector has been left in the dark as to the expected squeeze in finances after Chancellor Alistair Darling delivered a Budget that was light on economic detail and heavy on pre-election...
Whitehall departments have set out how they plan to achieve the government’s efficiency target of £11bn a year by the end of the next Spending Review period.
The troubled Rural Payments Agency has admitted it will still be ‘some time’ before it fixes the IT systems that have left the £1.6bn Single Payments Scheme for farmers mired in crisis since 2005.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones has challenged the findings of a report calling for up to £3m in additional funding to be spent to prevent a major E. coli catastrophe.
Plans to increase the financial powers of Scotland’s Parliament amount to the most dramatic change in taxation ever envisaged by the UK Treasury, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy told the CIPFA in...
The government is offering commitments on skills training for young people at the same time as making wholesale changes to the structure of further education funding. Can this be done at a time of...
Has Alistair Darling’s Budget done enough to rein in public spending? Economists, as ever, are divided. In this first of three features on the changing UK economy, Roger Latham and Malcolm Prowle...
The Care Quality Commission is on course to register all NHS trusts in England. But it has been hard work for both the regulator and the trusts, its chief executive tells David Williams
The Student Loan Company did ‘not enjoy value for money in 2009’ and was beset by problems with processing applications, a damning report by the National Audit Office has shown
The financial hurdles facing English universities came under the spotlight again this week after provisional public funding allocations for 2010/11 were released.
Evidence from the Total Place pilots shows that the government's big new idea for funding local services will need nurturing in Whitehall. Chris Leslie and Nigel Keohane explain why it means change...
The high-speed rail white paper confirmed that – despite the recession – the massive government investment programme is being given the green light. Christian Wolmar reports
The government is risking its credit rating being downgraded by not taking ‘faster and deeper’ action to cut the public deficit, a leading economist has warned
As the general election approaches, many returning officers want to delay counting votes until the following day – but the government is trying to stop them. Lucy Phillips reports
