In my day job as a Futurist I’ve spent quite a lot of time in and around Westminster, including giving evidence to the Education Select Committee on their enquiry into the…
Organizations with a payroll over £3m a year are required to pay an apprenticeship levy of 0.5% of their payroll to the government. For overstretched schools, academy trusts and colleges this can be a significant figure. In many…
At present academy trusts are not required to publish their accounts in spite of receiving huge amounts of public funding. We also hear regularly about financial irregularities involving ‘related parties’, although large transactions must now be approved…
When the Universal Credit concept was introduced in 2010 it sounded like a real step forwards — simplifying a complex and bewildering system of working-age benefits and ensuring that payments would taper as the recipient moved into work, avoiding the cliff edge that people had experienced…
The TUC have found significant evidence that zero hours contracts penalise workers, who are paid significantly less for the same work, and more likely to be expected to work unsocial hours. The uncertainty of whether they will be required to work at all has been identified as a major…
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, 43% (23 million) of the UK’s 54 million adults have such low incomes that they do not pay income tax. However, everyone is taxed indirectly through VAT for all but a small set of VAT exempt items such as children’s…
The recent Cambridge Analytica investigation by the DCMS Select Committee showed the extent to which the lack of any meaningful regulation of political advertising online is an existential threat to our democracy. Anyone can turn up and post…
From 1998 to 2010 we had eight largely invisible regional assemblies in England, concerned principally with oversight of the Regional Development Agencies. Plans were developed but subsequently abandoned to give them greater powers, following a ‘no’ vote…
Due to a quirk of the way that devolution was implemented, the Welsh Assembly can only amend legislation in specific areas devolved to it, and has no tax raising powers of its own. The Scottish Parliament can…
The people of Northern Ireland have become a political football in the ongoing wrangling over Brexit, but without any say in the matter. Nearly 50 years on from the 1973 referendum on the future of Northern Ireland, and after over 20 years of peace following the Good Friday Agreement, it’s time…