Complexity, cherry-picking, cuts

30Oct10

I went to a couple of events this week which circled around the future for criminal justice in England and Wales, and the role of the voluntary sector. The first, a seminar organised by the Third Sector Research Centre and Auril, looked at variety of issues affecting the voluntary sector, including the personalisation agenda, the [...]

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The devil in the detail

26Oct10

Mary Riddell writes in today’s Telegraph on Labour’s response to the comprehensive spending review. You can make your own guess as to the shrewd observer quoted.

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Cuts, with or without results

20Oct10

So the the comprehensive spending review has been announced and the Ministry of Justice, as predicted, is one of the big losers with six per cent budget cuts year on year for the four year period. £1.3 billion may be designated for maintaining the prison estate, but for the first time in many many years [...]

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Reform, momentum, change

28Jun10

I’ve been doing a lot of linking recently, and not much blogging. This doesn’t reverse the trend.  Mary Riddell writes for the Telegraph on why the coalition should embrace penal reform. You can spot a bit of momentum building up.  One might almost be excused for suspecting the proverbial change is proverbially afoot.

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Charities, prisons and profit

16Jun10

Last night I spoke to the all party parliamentary group on the community and voluntary sector on whether charities should “beware of taking on the coercive role of the state”.  This is shorthand for whether charities should be involved in the management of prisons, something which a handful of voluntary organisations are now doing by [...]

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O Canada

07Jun10

Serendipitously given the papers are full today of how the Canadian government’s experience of delivering 20% cuts to public spending in the 1990s is the model on which the Coalition will base its own approach to reducing the deficit, I discovered that an article I’ve written for the July edition of the Howard Journal of [...]

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The cuts uncut

28May10

NCVO’s head of research, Karl Wilding, has an excellent blog post on the public spending cuts ahead and their impact on the voluntary sector.

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The general election

13Apr10

Some interesting columns and blogs today which hover around one of this general election’s elephants in the room. Both the Labour and Conservative manifestos put ‘choice’ at the rhetorical heart of their promises to reform public services.  Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times suggests that in reality the divide between the parties is about ‘central control’ [...]

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