The NHS has traditionally been organized, like most public services, on the basis of place.
This has been both a control and a planning mechanism. It is a planning mechanism because it uses available information about the demographic and health profile of an area and seeks to match provision to need. It is also a control mechanism, that ensures that spending doesn’t get out of control and that the distribution of resources is fair, in relation to need. Continue reading “Mis-Placing NHS Funds?”
Here’s a simple question about the NHS reforms – who’s going to count the beans? Bean counting gets a bad press, but as soon as someone fails to count the public sector beans – for which read “the taxpayers money” – properly all hell breaks loose. Continue reading “NHS Reform: Who’s Gonna Count the Beans?”
A senior PCT manager writes to tell me that they have estimated that the new GP Consortia – costing about £25-£35 per patient to run – will mean between £7-£10m for their area, whilst the current PCT costs at most £7m. Continue reading “GP Consortia will cost more to run than PCTs?”
On this morning’s Today programme Education minister Michael Gove – reputedly a man of great intelligence – maintained that raising University tuition fees to nearly 3 times their current level for some Universities would have absolutely no effect on levels of applications from students from lower and middle income backgrounds. Continue reading “University Fees and Muddled Motives”
The BBC radio 4 ‘Today’ programme asked me if I’d give them an analysis of what a 25% cut in Departmental budegts would actually look like by applying it to one department: the Home Office (the interview is here if you want to listen). Continue reading “What do 25% cuts look like? Like this…..”
Spending on public services is set to reduce by 25% in real terms by 2014-15 (apart from Health and International Development). One quarter of all other public services could go – that is the equivalent of around a fifth of all public sector staff or well over a million jobs. Continue reading “The Budget and Public Services: it really is worse than we thought”
I’ve just been discussing with a colleague what sort of crisis we are in and what the effects for Public Management Reform are likely to be. Lots of people are discussing what the financial crisis means for public services and public management, without stepping back to think about what sort of crisis the public sector (internationally) faces?
The big issue for me is not the public sector financial crisis per se, but what caused it? Only by understanding that can we start to understand the possible reactions to it. Continue reading “What sort of crisis is public management in?”
from Professor Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Two Nobel Laureates and over 2000 Signatories Uphold that Economists have Mistaken Mathematical Beauty for Economic Truth
Continue reading “The Financial Crisis: How Economists Went Astray”
Don’t dismantle the public domain because of this latest one…. see my article in today’s Guardian.
See also my brief comment on George Osborne’s ‘cull’ of Whitehall in todays Financial Times.
In a great article in today’s Oberserver, Will Hutton reviews the origins of the current political crisis in the UK in the constitutional set-up which confers monarchical powers on Prime Ministers, something I have written about frequently here and in the pages of Public Finance – see for example this one… Continue reading “Will Hutton on Prime Ministerial power and public administration”
Colin Talbot - my blog 