JUDY HIRST | Become your own boss. It sounds like one of those ads promising vast wealth from telemarketing. But this week the Conservatives gave an old catch phrase a fresh twist, with their souped-...
JONATHAN CARR-WEST | Lambeth council's plans to establish a John Lewis style mutual has been contrasted with Barnet's 'Easy Council' model. However, the real picture is more complicated, with both...
MALCOLM PROWLE | Climate change has become a controversial area, but there are no doubts that our natural resources are finite and will run out eventually. Plans to restructure our economies and...
MELISSA BENN | It’s been another frantic week of debate on the future of our education. Private school head and Blair biographer Anthony Seldon has argued that our children are not learning to think...
ALAN DOWNEY | The starting gun for a public sector recession has been fired. It is now only a matter of time before we are faced with the deepest and most prolonged cuts in public expenditure that...
JOHN TIZARD | Opposition leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne are right to demand that public sector contracts with the business and third sectors should be transparent, but...
MIKE THATCHER | It’s unlikely that we have seen the last of the public sector strikes that afflicted Greece this week, as the troubled country attempts rapidly to reduce its budget deficit.
PHILIP JOHNSTON | Most people expect Labour to suffer a heavy defeat in the election. But polls show that disillusionment with politicians in general might lead to a hung Parliament
GEMMA TETLOW AND ROWENA CRAWFORD | To fill the fiscal hole, the next government will have to slash some budgets by as much as 25%, cut benefits or raise taxes
All over the country, councils are seeking to freeze or even cut council tax. This will have devastating effects on local services, while saving council taxpayers very little indeed.
JAMES CLOSE | A pledge to scrap a number of education quangos underpinned Nick Clegg’s recent announcement to give every child from a poor home a £2,500 funding boost
The PCS union is balloting its members on industrial action over cuts to redundancy payments for civil servants. Five other unions have accepted the changes, but the PCS represents almost three times...
The drives toward passing the Personal Care at Home Bill, the green paper/white paper ideas and the social care transformation agenda are not convincingly synchronised. They need to be - there’s a...
JUDY HIRST | Who are the good guys? For the protagonists in The Road – the movie based on Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel – it’s a life and death question.
TONY TRAVERS | Four hapless MPs have been experiencing the hell of high-rise living as part of a TV show. Such housing problems are not new, but compelling solutions seem no closer
It is possible to cut public spending significantly without pushing the economy back into recession. But the next government will need to change its approach, and focus on infrastructure projects, UK...
CHRIS LESLIE | It is surely essential that the local dimension is not neglected in the grand debates about constitutional reform – and if there is merit for a shift to a ‘preference based’ electoral...
The public sector's system of checks and balances hinders the progress of large infrastructure projects. There is a clear opportunity here for whoever wins the election to make some important changes.
RICHARD REEVES | If the principal weapons against inequality were reports, commissions and panels, we'd have reached an egalitarian nirvana decades ago
Councils should be allowed to use Section 106 money to undertake repairs and improvements to existing properties and not just to improve new developments.
