Feature and news articles by Max Rashbrooke
From the pulpit of his church in Manhattan, the Rev James Herbert Cooper has criticised the worst excesses of the global financial crisis. But can religion really help fix the economy? Wall Street is the world’s most famous thoroughfare, a street synonymous with great wealth, Gordon Gekko and the adage that greed is good....
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 →Chris Paling, novelist, has worked in our city for 30 years. The capital is the setting of two of his novels, including the latest, Nimrod’s Shadow, published this month. And yet, he says, “I don’t know London very well.” The city is “a place I tend to travel through on the way to work”, which...
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...
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