As we know, the government’s policy about what happens in cities and neighbourhoods is based on its principles of ‘localism’ and encouraging the ‘Big Society’. On the other hand, its policies on migration are essentially national ones – cutting net migration and introducing a whole raft of detailed changes in the different kinds of migration…
Migration Watch has published a new claim that meeting the social housing needs of new immigrants will cost the tax payer £1 billion a year for the next 25 years. It bases its assessment on the fact that migration is currently expected to lead to the formation of 83,000 new households each year, out of…
As part of the authoritarian crackdown following last week’s riots, David Cameron announced on Friday that rioters should be evicted from their council houses – even though the only thing that we know for sure about the connection between riots and where people live is that some of the disturbances happened in or near social…
Plans to evict council tenants involved in last week’s rioting are based on a number of false arguments. The government is simply looking for a headline-catching ruse to give the impression that it is responding robustly As kneejerk reactions go, David Cameron’s bid to evict rioters from council houses must count as one of the…
The prime minister might have toned down the references to competition in launching the Open public services white paper but the direction of travel is clear Ian Mulheirn is worried that the government’s open public services white paper has backed off from introducing full competition. That’s not the way it looks if you have experience…
Reading Ian Mulheirn’s blog about the government’s hesitancy in privatising public services, I began to wonder who is being unrealistic here and whether the government really understands what it is now suggesting when it proposes a bigger role for the voluntary sector. When David Cameron said back in February that he wanted to open up…
Eric Pickles’ announcement on 1st March that councils will be in trouble if their cuts target the voluntary sector started a debate about whether councils are guilty or not. This is presumably what the Secretary of State wanted when he accused local authorities of being ‘high-minded’, not listening to the sector and failing to give…