By now it is clear that Chancellor George Osborne will announce steep tax rises and outline spending cuts that will be pretty horrendous. The good news is that the government is taking the task to...
If the era of new politics is upon us, the emergency Budget next week presents an opportunity for the government to commit to the long term, to supporting people into sustainable work.
His brother's choice of snack makes for fascinating reading, but more interesting still is the peeling away of fellow contender Ed Miliband's layers of compassion
The 'emergency Budget' is almost upon us. It's going to be a game of two halves. On the one hand, with the Office for Budget Responsibility acting as fiscal referee, there's Cameron's promise of pain...
The London Pension Fund Authority Green Paper referred to conditional indexing of pensions increases and the wider implications of this in relation to pensioner representation (voting) on the Local...
It is with some hesitation that I question CIPFA luminary Philip Sellers' comments on the status and position of local government finance directors in today's bleak economic environment.
No, Philip Sellers, it is not 'obvious that the finance director is number two in the organisational structure' ('There must be room at the top', Letters June 4-10).
The waiting is almost over. Last week's CIPFA Conference may go down as the last such event of the old era, the end of the Good Old Days! As new President, Jaki Meekings Davis said in her opening...
Next week's Emergency Budget, and the commencement of the new Spending Review following closely on from the Chancellor's earlier cuts package, are focussing council leaders and chief executive's...
Access to a decent home is a key building block for a happy, healthy life, and unless we want to condemn millions of people on lower incomes to a lifetime of housing misery it is imperative the...
It was US President Harry Truman who reportedly said that he was fed-up with economists who told him 'on the one hand Mr President…', followed by 'but on the other hand…'. Truman said he wanted a one...
Increasing VAT in the Budget will hit the poor more than the rich, have more impact on small firms than big ones, threaten retail jobs, increase tax avoidance and boost inflation
Your web story, 'Union members might accept job losses in return for more say', reports less than 10% of my speech to the CIPFA conference - and so takes the little mentioned entirely out of context.
Chancellor George Osborne's announcement about including the public in deciding where the public spending axe should fall is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate
As former Swedish prime minister Goran Persson told the annual CIPFA conference in Harrogate this week, it's easy to get elected; what's difficult is to get re-elected
A government's ability to respond quickly to economic shocks depends on its basic beliefs. This might be a problem in a coalition holding very different views
Following David Cameron's speech about the UK's budget deficit on June 7, I was rung up by a few journalists asking me to comment on some of the 'terrible' things he had said. My initial reaction...
David Cameron today further emphasised the impending cuts that are coming to public sector budgets. Last year we estimated in our Public Sector Cities report that 290,000 public service jobs are...
