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 →In the Philippines, the word ‘Ilustrado’ refers to a class of native intellectuals who were nurtured by but then revolted against their Spanish colonial masters. It’s a fitting title, then, for Miguel Syjuco’s novel, which is both a dissection of his native land’s strengths and failings and an exploration of one man’s attempt to...
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 →Having had great success with one animal fable, 2003’s Booker Prize-winning, seven million-selling Life of Pi, Yann Martel has gone one better: an animal fable in the shape of a play within a play. Beatrice and Virgil is the story of Henry, a novelist who believes that more “poetic license” should be taken with...
Read more →