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Let me start with a rather important paragraph, with apologies for the jargon. “The Commission concludes the CRA was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis. Many subprime lenders were not subject to the CRA. Research indicates only 6% of high-cost...

I remember hearing the visionary co-production pioneer Edgar Cahn talk about the defence of his National Legal Services Programme, the service that helped organisations to sue the government to enforce their rights.  He had urged the programme over the years to ask...

I get my gas from British Gas.  It isn't a perfect solution, and I will be getting £53 of their vast price increase back, I gather.  Whoopee.  I can't quite get my head around why this tweak works, but it has made me think about the way our services are currently...

I listened to the Localis lecture by Penrith MP Rory Stewart this afternoon. He was talking about the importance of local action -if we are going to fulfil our promise to our children that they can grow up and re-make the world. He told the story of a small village in...

'Co-production' is one of those buzzwords that echo down the corridors of Whitehall without necessarily touching the walls. It is an important critique of public services and a set of linked proposals to finding the untapped resources that can save public services in...

I've had a go at a critique of 'evidence-based policy' in another place (as they say), and have not necessarily won the argument.  What I'm trying to say is that criticising the specific ideology called 'evidence-based policy' does not mean that somehow we should stop...

Here's an extraordinary story. But it should be much more ordinary. The reasons it isn't have a lot to do with how we are assuming our society should be organised from the top down, by big (increasingly privatised) organisations, and with a fair degree of homogenous '...

My nine-year-old came back from school yesterday evening in a cynical mood.  What had piqued his cynicism was the constant repetition, in rhetoric and on noticeboards, that his primary school is a 'Rights-Respecting School'. "They say they listen to us and ask our...

For the past generation, Western Australia has been pioneering a different way of organising social care. It was the brainchild of their new mental health commissioner Eddie Bartnik, and it flew in the face of conventional methods, which assess needs and try to slot...

Being a helpful kind of guy, I have written a number of blog posts elsewhere about what frustrates good decisions by governments. And how easy it is to get sucked into making bad ones.  Sometimes appalling ones that echo down the decades. You can read my top ten here....