Tag: Ruth Dixon
It’s impossible to find out by how much the Coalition did cut civil service admin costs. This is why
Driving down administrative costs has long been a government priority, and the 2010-15 coalition government was particularly ambitious in this regard. Did they succeed in doing so? Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, drawing on their award-winning A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less?, explain how numerous civil service reclassifications have made it impossible to track spending accurately. They […]
‘Too close to call’? Accounting for satisfaction with party leadership would have helped better predict the General Election
A good predictor of electoral outcomes over the past nine UK general elections has been survey questions asking about satisfaction with the leaders of the two main parties. That measure, however, combines responses from people who support the party and those who don’t. Here, Ruth Dixon explores leader satisfaction among party supporters as a way of measuring the level of ‘enthusiastic […]
How many judicial review cases are received by UK government departments?
In a recent debate in Parliament, the secretary for justice Chris Grayling was unable to provide a number when asked how many judicial review cases are brought against government ministries. Ruth Dixon looks at the numbers, finding no evidence of an explosion of judicial challenges to central government departments. During a debate in parliament on 1 December, Chris […]
Repeated government ‘makeovers’ have not created a government machine that works better and costs less
What do we have to show for thirty years of makeovers in UK central government? Has a relentless focus on cost-cutting damaged traditional administrative values? In a wide-ranging study of UK central government, Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon found that not only did formal complaints and legal challenges to central government rise sharply over the three decades up to […]
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