Tag: Accountability

Institutions have no power without legitimacy, English exam boards are learning this lesson the hard way

With one short sentence uttered in 1965, Fred Lee, then Britain's minister for power, encapsulated the government's hopes of providing the country with cheap...

It sat for 340 days, heard evidence from 195 witnesses and received over 4000 letters of objection. The public inquiry into Sizewell B was the second biggest ever - but it came to the wrong conclusion.

Books that John has reviewed in the past...

Many people wish there was a nicer model of economic development than captalism. In reality, the best thing they can do is encourage Western firms to raise their standards.

Whilst both the government and the market plays ever closer attention to the dismal performance of Railtrack it is worth asking why a separate track authority was needed in the first place. Given that the financial case is so compelling, how might Railtrack now be renationalised so as to achieve autonomy with real accountability?

Managers are unavoidably charged to balance the benefit of innovation with the risks of new processes, and to do this well. But the disastrous effects of asbestos manufacture and BSE indicate that markets and regulation are not helping.

Since the early days of privatisation, there has been an evident need for a framework which gave operational autonomy and managerial responsibility in public services but which was not the framework of the plc. But there is merit in pluralism here too.

It is the state of economy that decides elections: Or so the theory goes. The evidence, however, suggests that voters do pay far greater attention to the issues and politicians really do mean what they say.

Oxford University is still one the world's greatest academic institutions. To rise to fresh challenges in the twenty first century it must begin to address the ineffectiveness of its proceedings.