I have recently had cause to reread CentreForum’s Your Choice: how to get better public services, published back in the summer. Don’t ask. It’s for a thing. The resonance between the sorts of prescriptions that emerge from Queen Anne’s Gate and the policy prescriptions within the subsequent Open […]
Getting rid of inefficient and ineffective regulations sounds like a good idea. So does stopping the proliferation of inefficient or ineffective new regulations. The problem is, of course, that views on what constitutes inefficient or ineffective regulation differ sharply. The Coalition agreement, in its section on supporting business, […]
The Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday are carrying stories about internal discussions on the Party’s identity and public profile. For the Telegraph this is a return to a theme first raised in March. The papers both carry a quote from an unidentified party spokesman acknowledging that this […]
Over at Cif today Grant Shapps makes another attempt to make the case for the policy of criminalising all squatting of residential buildings. He makes the connection to homelessness support and rightly points out that there is more money going in to homelessness services, which may compensate for […]
[Originally posted at Dale&Co, 22/11/11, It is an earlier version of material discussed in Laying the foundations?] The much anticipated, and heavily trailed, housing strategy for England – Laying the foundations – arrived on Monday. The Government’s claim is that the strategy will “get the housing market moving […]
We’d all like everyone to like us. We’d all like everyone to think everything we do is great. Unless we’re very lucky, that doesn’t tend to be how things are in real life. But apparently it is in CLG-land. I invite you to have a quick look at […]
Yesterday saw the publication of the Coalition’s housing strategy. It brought together policy touching upon housing from across a range of Whitehall Departments. The document represents a welcome recognition of the importance of housing to the broader economy and society. It covers quite a lot of ground, although […]
The media, both old and new, is currently under intense scrutiny. Last week James Murdoch was back before the Media Select Committee, making his bid for the title of least inquisitive Chief Executive in corporate history. On Monday we witnessed a fascinating encounter between the Joint Parliamentary Committee […]
[Originally posted on Liberal Democrat Voice, 18/11/11, under a slightly different title] It is a truth universally acknowledged that Britain has a housing problem. There are problems of shortage and, consequently, access and affordability. There are three principal mechanisms for dealing with significant housing shortage and indirectly reducing […]
There are many models of policy-making in the literature. Some are simplistic. Some are tediously over-elaborate. At the moment I’m reading Malcolm Dean’s new book, Democracy under attack, in which he offers his own informal, institutionally-oriented definition. Dean manages to convey the imperatives, intricacies and intractability of much […]
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