The following articles were first published in The Guardian
The recent fate of UK leaders in New Zealand highlights the difficulty of parachuting in managers from one country to another. Every country has different rules for its public services – which is why UK civil servants aren’t always a hit overseas. “An unexpected journey” is the subtitle of the first Hobbit film, New...
Read more →A belief that there shouldn’t be profit in public service has led one former council chief executive to pledge a £100,000 redundancy payout back to the public, but it’s also a break with the past, he says. Jim McKenna is not, he insists, a saint. He is, in his own words, an “ordinary” guy...
Read more →New research shows councils could save billions on procurement. The hard part is turning those potential savings into reality. Local councils could save themselves £2.2bn a year by driving a better deal on the goods and services they buy from private companies, according to new research. The data, compiled by procurement company Spikes Cavell...
Read more →A pioneering project in north London shows the value of getting public agencies to work together. But having one person ‘go into bat’ for vulnerable families is just as important. Angela, a cute one-year-old with tight pigtails, plays placidly amongst the scattered toys in the Packington Estate’s children’s centre in north London. A year...
Read more →Britain’s senior civil servants are making preparations for spending cuts of up to 30% from next year, resulting in major job losses, in what is being dubbed the “public sector recession”. Leading figures in the outsourcing industry have said they are planning to take over large swaths of public services as Whitehall prepares to...
Read more →While citizen involvement has become an election buzzword, local groups are left railing against the reality. A warm, sunny Sunday in April brings the season’s first sunbathers on to the shingled beaches of Hastings, in East Sussex. A perfect day, too, for promenading on the pier – or it would be if it hadn’t been...
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