Monthly Archives: March 2012

At least, that’s the implication of Paragraph 2.207 in the Budget red book: Personal service companies and IR35  -  The Government will introduce a package of measures to tackle avoidance through the use of personal service companies and to make the IR35 … Continue reading →

The NHS risk register, or at least the version of it that has made it into the public domain, doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I’ve discussed many of the risks at length here and Father Dougal spotted … Continue reading →

Alison Chisnell has been digging into some of the statistics on female board members. The headline figures show some improvement. [W]omen now make up 15.6% of the boards in FTSE 100 companies, compared to 12.5% last March and a government target … Continue reading →

Richard Wilson, the former cabinet secretary, warned yesterday that forcing the government to publish the NHS risk register could have unintended consequences: It is deeply disturbing that the storm over the Health and Social Care Bill, now at its height … Continue reading →

Henley’s Professor Simon Collinson reckons that central government departments are 30 percent more complex than private companies. He has developed a methodology to measure the level of complexity in an organisation and has come up with the Global Simplicity Index. A … Continue reading →

Has Lord Oakeshott been reading my blog? Me, last year, on the subject of a Land Value Tax: The left’s billions in lost taxes are just as elusive as the right’s billions of public sector waste. When you look at the … Continue reading →

Things happen so quickly these days. Yesterday morning Greg Smith was a brave whistleblower, after his extraordinary piece in the New York Times attacking his employer Goldman Sachs. By the evening, UK time, the backlash had started with ad hominem attacks … Continue reading →

At least that’s the implication of this piece in the Telegraph. According to the paper, if Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin lose their case at the European Court of Human Rights, the government would consider legislating to give employees the right … Continue reading →

According to several news sites around the world, the British government is about to ban the wearing of crosses at work. Even the Scotsman, which I usually think of as a serious newspaper, screamed “Outrage at move towards banning Christian … Continue reading →

Politicians of all parties make wild claims about the savings that can be achieved through sharing back office services. Cut the bureaucrats before the frontline services, said Eric Pickles when councils protested at the massive cuts they were having to … Continue reading →