- Ten Commandments of good policy making: a retrospective by Sir Gus O’Donnell
Sir Gus O’Donnell recently delivered a lecture at the LSE on his time in the civil service. What follows is his overview of the triumphs and disasters, as well as his ten commandments of good policy making. - Ignoring the role of private debt in an economy is like driving without accounting for your blind-spot
Steve Keen argues that neoclassical economists have a blind-spot when it comes to the role of private debt in macroeconomics. They should be worried by the incredibly high UK levels and be seeking ways to avoid the next crash. - The incentives of senior bank managers need to be altered in order to make them more risk averse
David Kershaw, Tom Kirchmaier and Edmund Schuster argue that we need to alter the basic incentive structures of senior managers in systemically important financial institutions. For starters, there should be no bonuses and no performance-related pay of any form. - Not everyone is Sir Alex Ferguson: systemic constraints, not just individual leadership, are responsible for persistent differences in school standards
Research demonstrates that running a successful school is not just down to having an inspirational headteacher and staff. Ruth Lupton writes that the additional struggles faced by disadvantaged schools in retaining excellent teachers and dealing with a wide range of learning needs, social problems and a challenging emotional environment constitute real challenges to organisational capacity and improvement. These must be acknowledged if Government is to achieve its goal of closing the performance gap between schools in richer and poorer areas. - Britain leaving the EU is now a serious possibility
Tim Bale argues that the Conservatives may find it very difficult to avoid promising an in/out referendum on EU membership at the next election, and the Labour Party may well follow suit. With that referendum comes the serious possibility that Britain will cease to be a member of the Union. - The Occupy movements have dramatised questions about public space: Who owns it? And who can use it?
One year on, Richard Sennett reflects on the Occupy movements and the nature of public space. He argues that the Occupiers not only changed the terms of debate about the current economic crisis, they also challenged urbanists to think about the city in new ways. - Women police officers may lose equality gains with the current police reform programme
Jennifer Brown and Daniel Bear argue that cuts to the police budget may have unintended consequences for women in destroying many of the gains that have been made for gender equality. - High rents are holding back the recovery
Peter Jefferys argues for building affordable social homes and reforming the private rented sector. He makes the case that lower rent is vital for economic recovery, stating, if average rents in England had risen at the rate of inflation since 2000, rather than well above, then renters would have an extra £8 billion per year of disposable income.