The health service can afford pay rises of no more than 2.5% next year, NHS Employers said this week as concern grew over NHS organisations' ability to balance their books.
Ministers have left ample scope to opt out of implementing two-tier workforce agreements across the public sector, despite pledging to end pay variations for transferred staff, a leading academic has...
Welsh local government leaders are demanding financial help directly from the Treasury to plug the funding gap they claim has been created by a delay in publishing the results of Sir Michael Lyons'...
Despite record sums of money being injected into the NHS, trusts are still struggling to balance the books, with deficits running into millions of pounds. So what is going on? Seamus Ward tries to...
At first sight, the plan to cut down the public sector inspectorates from 11 to four seems sensible. But a closer look shows there is method in the seeming madness of the current messy, overlapping...
Local Improvement Finance Trusts can make a big difference to health services, but issues need to be resolved around value-for-money comparisons, resourcing and the rationalisation of primary care...
Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has been criticised by the Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance for calling for a reduction in the size of the province's public sector.
As the Conservatives gear up for their Blackpool conference next week, they face their most important leadership contest in more than 40 years. Philip Johnston analyses the policies behind the beauty...
Gordon Brown's fiscal rules were invented to win his party credibility, but he has changed their definitions so often that unless they are independently scrutinised we face a borrowing disaster
The NHS needs finance skills more than ever if it is to transform itself into a modern, forward-planning organisation while struggling with major structural upheavals, growing deficits and the need...
Public service unions are vowing to step up their opposition to the government's controversial reform programme after bloodying ministers' noses over pensions and the NHS at the Labour Party...
Leaked official documents suggest that the government is planning far wider private sector involvement in the NHS than previously admitted, a senior member of the Common's health select committee has...
Patient and Public Involvement forums might be reformed along very similar lines to the recently abolished Community Health Councils, health minister Rosie Winterton said this week.
The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is considering proposals to expand the powers of local authority overview and scrutiny committees, so they would be able to hold government departments and...
The Liberal Democrat leadership this week called on members to support a bold range of new policy proposals designed to give the party a real chance of electoral success by the end of the decade.
Can you only feel the public service ethos if you are employed by the public sector? Of course not, says Ann Rossiter. It all depends on the values of the service provider
NHS organisations continue to face tough financial decisions because of chronic underspending in the 1980s and 1990s, the NHS Confederation said this week.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are meant to be as one on the need for radical public sector reform. But as Blair embarks on one of his last Party conferences as PM, his quest for a legacy is bringing...
The rules of the much-debated Private Finance Initiative game are about to change. The Office for National Statistics is soon expected to start counting a new tranche of PFI deals against public...
Senior trade unionists have called on Chancellor Gordon Brown to make good his commitment to the 2004 Warwick accord, amid concerns that public employers are using a loophole in the two-tier...
NHS trusts and private care providers should compete on price as well as quality under payment by results, according to shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley.
