The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is one half of the most challenging education upheaval yet. Will it provide firm foundations for further and higher education and boost the UK...
Parents of up to 1 million children living in disability-related poverty will be subjected to tougher benefit tests next year, under plans to get 20,000 incapacitated people back into work.
London's five Olympic boroughs will experiment with an employment programme aimed at entire families, under government plans to devolve tailored services.
A flagship government policy aimed at encouraging GPs to shape local NHS services through a beefed-up commissioning role is struggling to take off, the Audit Commission has found.
Welsh local authorities have a tough housing standard to meet and only one real way of paying for it: transferring their stock to an RSL. It's not a popular policy, especially for councils whose...
Despite the rhetoric, the public sector is still handcuffed by bureaucracy and targets. A better solution is performance contracting, which has worked in prisons and has the power to bring creativity...
Private contractors providing welfare services could be subjected to a ratings system similar to that used for councils and NHS trusts, under government plans to tackle unemployment and poverty.
More than 40% of benefit claimants who enter work are back on the dole within six months, auditors have reported, casting doubt on ministers' plans to get millions more people into sustainable...
Whitehall's largest trade union this week re-entered 'meaningful' talks with the Cabinet Office, despite voting overwhelmingly for further industrial action over civil service pay, privatisation and...
Local government leaders' eyes are firmly fixed on the detail of the forthcoming Revenue Support Grant for some certainty on exactly where the Comprehensive Spending Review settlement has left them.
The Ministry of Defence spends too much of its budget on military hardware and not enough on the armed forces' pay and housing, a think-tank has reported.
The timing could hardly have been worse. Job creation is the Northern Ireland Executive's top priority, Finance Minister Peter Robinson announced in his Budget.
Ways to cope with the economic and social implications of an ageing society are at last on the government's to-do list. Public Finance and Deloitte convened a round table of politicians and policy...
Pensions minister Mike O'Brien is set to lift the legal ban on divorcees accessing their spouse's retirement income under the state's Pension Protection Fund, Public Finance can reveal.
A £250m contingency fund should be created by the Treasury to help councils facing unplanned costs and potential community tensions because of poor immigration monitoring, town hall leaders have...
Anti-poverty campaigners this week expressed disappointment that the government's new Child Poverty Unit will not include Treasury officials, despite the department's role in achieving crucial...
The government must press ahead with changes to the accounting rules governing the treatment of the Private Finance Initiative to demonstrate the role of these projects in improving public services,...
Auditors this week published a glowing report on the independent Pensions Regulator, noting that oversight of the sector has improved markedly since it was set up in 2005.
& it's the way that you do it. And that's the problem when it comes to putting policies such as healthy eating into practice. Phil Swann identifies the obstacles
'Personalised public services' is the Brown government's latest Big Idea. But how are the ambitious plans for round-the-clock GP services, individual health budgets and one-to-one tutoring going to...
