Monthly Archives: March 2011

                   This week has seen at least two attempts to destabilise the health reforms. Channel 4 came up with a very sloppy piece of journalism, wrongly claiming that the whole of Parliament had failed to spot an error in the Health Bill that would allow GPs to profit from conflicts of interest. The Today [...]

                   The 84,000 MOD personnel are all civilians – in charge of desks and related duties.  These are in addition to the 180,000 or so uniformed personnel in the army, navy and air force.

              The Coalition government has been hit by a blizzard of difficult court judgements from the European Court of Human Rights (Convention) and from the European Court of Justice (EU).  They have served to underline just how constrained Ministers and Parliament now are, given the UK’s acceptance of both these jurisdictions. The European Court of [...]

               Amidst the controversy over sacking armed services personnel I have today received the figures for the MOD headcount.              The total is down 1470 between May 2010 and January 2011 (full time equivalents). Over this same time period 3250 (fte) left the MOD, implying they must have hired 1780 new people (fte) over the [...]

              As someone who has urged the use of natural wastage to control staff numbers and costs in government departments, I have just asked a series of questions to see how Ministers are getting on.            One of the first to come through are the figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.  In [...]

            We are about to discover how worthwhile voting is if you are both in the EU and in the Euro.  The Irish election threw out the ruling party, which crashed to third place. A new Coalition is likely, made up of parties who wish to renegotiate the terms of the Irish loan and [...]