News
Policy Exchange debate - Human Embryology 18.30, 15th May 2008
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Government missing its own targets on the environment
A new report by the leading thinktank Policy Exchange today reveals that despite promising to “put concern for the environment at the heart of policy-making” the Government looks likely to miss over half of the green targets it has set since 1997.
Read the full note here or the press release here
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Time to put parents in control of special educational needs policy
A new report on special educational needs (SEN), produced by think tanks CentreForum and Policy Exchange, argues that the so-called ‘inclusion’ debate – whether children with learning difficulties should be taught in mainstream or special schools – misses the fundamental point: that it is parents, not politicians or officials, who should decide how and where their children are educated.
Read the full report here or the press release here
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System is failing to weed out incompetent teachers
On the day of the national teachers’ strike, the leading thinktank Policy Exchange has released figures which show that pupils are not being protected from incompetent teachers {figures broken down by local authority below}. Employers (in most cases the local education authority but sometimes the school itself) are legally obliged to refer to the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) teachers who have been dismissed on grounds of incompetence. They are also supposed to refer cases in which a teacher left a school voluntarily but would have been dismissed if they had not. The GTCE then has the power, if they decide further action should be taken, to: issue a reprimand to the teacher; attach conditions to a teacher’s registration (e.g. further training) or remove a teacher from the register either temporarily or permanently.
Read the full report here or the press release here
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Spending arms race by the political parties ‘a myth’
Expert reveals parties are accessing extensive and unprecedented State funding already
The case for urgent reform of Britain’s political finance laws, and for increased state funding of political parties, is generally based on the premise that the expenditures of British political parties have rocketed. Labour and the Conservatives – so the argument goes – have each attempted to outspend each other in a manner reminiscent of an ‘arms race’.
Read the full report here or the summary here
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George Osborne delivers speech to Policy Exchange
Read Summary here
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Parents’ childcare preferences not being met
Leading thinktank proposes universal childcare allowance
Parents in Britain still pay 70 per cent of their childcare costs compared to the European average of 30 per cent. This is in spite of a decade of intensive reform and total spending of £17 billion from 1997 to 2006 on services for young children. Nevertheless, according to ‘Little Britons’, a comprehensive new report into childcare choice for the leading thinktank Policy Exchange, parents’ preferences for childcare are not being met by the options currently available. The Government’s basic aim has been to encourage as many mothers as possible into paid work – and for children to be placed in formal childcare settings - but women would actually prefer, in many cases, for their children to be cared for in their own homes, the report concludes.
Read the full report here or the summary here
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Freud has huge potential to cut unemployment and the benefit budget – new report
Half-hearted implementation without learning lessons from abroad could cause policy to fail
Contracting out employment services – the central and highly controversial recommendation of the review into Welfare To Work conducted by David Freud which reported in March 2007 – could slash unemployment and save the taxpayer over a billion pounds a year. That is the conclusion of the first analysis of other countries’ experiences conducted for leading British think tank Policy Exchange. The report ‘Paying for Success: How to make contracting out work in employment services’ by former Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley MP and Policy Exchange’s Chief Economist Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich argues, however, that care needs to be taken implementing the policy if the mistakes made abroad are not to be repeated in the UK.
To continue reading the summary click here or click here to read the full report
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Teacher training heading for another crisis – 18,000 more primary teachers needed by 2015 and secondary subject shortage
Teacher recruitment is considered to be a relative success in education policy under this Government – following a serious recruitment crisis in the late 90s. However, new figures released today in a paper by Professor John Howson for the leading think tank Policy Exchange called ‘The Labour Market for Teachers’ show that complacency over the past few years could be creating another crisis.
To continue reading click here or read the full report here
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Government “missing the boat” on green technology
Political timidity is preventing the development of carbon capture power stations
Fitting carbon capture and storage technology could slash global power emissions by 28% by 2050 but timidity and policy incoherence is holding back its large-scale deployment in the UK, according to a new report ‘Is Britain ready for Carbon Capture?’ by the leading thank tank Policy Exchange.
According to the authors of the report, led by Prof. Stuart Haszeldine of the University of Edinburgh, confusion over government policy and timescales means that the number of proposed Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects in the UK has halved in the past year.
Please click here to continue reading or here to read the full Research note
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Frank Field proposes radical reform package to revive British democracy
Bold suggestions include US-style primaries, run-offs, fixed terms and elected police chiefs
In a new paper for leading thinktank Policy Exchange ‘Back from Life Support: Remaking representative and responsible government in Britain’, Labour MP for Birkenhead, Frank Field, questions whether government in the UK any longer acts in the name of the people.
With reform of our institutions back at the heart of political debate, Field argues that they suffer a crisis of legitimacy, noting that turnout in general elections has dropped from around 75% between the end of the War and the late 1980s, to around just 60% in the last decade. He detects widespread cynicism in the electorate about the machinations of the political class, focussed as the politicians are on the few thousand votes in a small minority of seats that actually determine an election’s result.
Continue reading here or read the full report here
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Stronger city government is key to urban revival – Policy Exchange
…but some cities will still find it difficult to regenerate
In the first of a three-part series of reports on urban regeneration, leading thinktank Policy Exchange found that British towns and cities in receipt of substantial urban policy funding designed to bring them up to the economic standard nationally are, in fact, declining when judged by a whole range of indices. ‘Cities Limited’ called into question the £30bn spent in the last decade on a plethora of urban regeneration schemes delivered by a myriad of different agencies.
Continue reading here or read the second report in the series, ‘Success and the city’ here
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Government missing its own targets on the environment
A new report by the leading thinktank Policy Exchange today reveals that despite promising to “put concern for the environment at the heart of policy-making” the Government looks likely to miss over half of the green targets it has set since 1997.
Read the full note here or the press release here