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...
Read more →As the heavy wooden disk loops through the air and crashes into the pins, flattening most of them, the cry goes up: “Good cheese!”. Both crash and cry echo around a small room, under the Freemasons Arms pub in Hampstead. This is London’s last functioning skittles alley. The game thrived in the 1930s, when hundreds of...
Read more →Why are we so obsessed with making lists? It is this question that Umberto Eco, the philosopher, medievalist and writer best-known for ‘The Name of the Rose’, sets out to answer in his latest piece of non-fiction. The result is a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, tour through two millennia of tables, lists and categories, supported...
Read more →Could money be saved by turning empty office blocks, and even old Woolworths shops, into schools? Bristol Cathedral choir school’s principal, Neil Blundell, is striding along the corridor of the school’s newest building, the Parsonage, when he spots a pupil leaning against the wall, shirt-tails peeping out from beneath his sweater. “Would you like...
Read more →John Carleton is the head of Local Partnerships, the newest body trying to help councils drive a better bargain with private companies. He brings a wealth of experience from public service, banking, consultancy … and international rugby Perhaps one of the lowest points in John Carleton’s international rugby career, in which he garnered 32...
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