Merryn Somerset Webb

Would the public sector work better if its managers worked less? Lets cut their hours and see.

We could save £5bn a year if we brought all our public sector administrators and managers down to a four day week. So why don't we? You might think that cutting manager hours by 20% would see the public sector grind to a halt. But given the massive rise in the number of managers over the last 13 years it really isn't very likely. Lets not forget that, while there were 12 beds per NHS manager back in 1997, there are a mere 4 now. It might also be the case that without endless bureaucrats looking over their shoulders front line staff got more done too. TO read more click here

Even prime London house prices can - and will - fall

Think London house prices are immune from the falls hitting the rest of the market? Think again. Bonuses are thin on the ground these days; mortgages are tough to get; taxes are on the up; and there is no way a small group of enthusiastic foreign buyers can hold the market up all by themselves. To read more click here

The middle classes died a long time ago...

The middle classes as we - or perhaps only our parents - remember them are no more. Today's long hours, lack of job security and endless financial troubles mean they morphed into a new kind of working class a good decade ago. To read more click here

Why we shouldn't bail out developers - yet

Last year I spent a week in Manchester filming a property programme. The producers put me up in a ‘luxury’ two bedroom flat on the edge of Manchester. It was absolutely hideous. The flat was tiny – pre buy to let its floor space would have made it more a studio than a 2 bedder. It came with tiny furniture – presumably to make its own tininess less obvious and had no storage space at all. It was a pretty dismal place to be. But worse than the flat itself was its environment. It was in a block in the middle of lots of other blocks. They were all new or a few years old and they were all weathering badly. They offered no outside space to their hoped for owners and they didn’t compensate for this with anything in the way of community spaces. There were no pedestrian squares, no coffee shops, no shops of any other kind and no sign of any patches of green. It was a true buy to let wasteland. And an empty and lonely one at that. I remember saying at the time that how odd it was that private developers seemed to have learnt so few of the lessons taught by the failure of high rise council estates: instead they had repeated them, just with less floor space...

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The graduate tax makes no sense - the current system is good enough

Vince Cable says some very sensible things (see my last post). But he also comes up with some really silly ideas. During the election a prime example was the mansion tax. Now it is the graduate tax – or “contribution” as he calls it. Higher education is expensive. It has to be paid for and it is good if those who benefit most from it are the ones who pay for it. But taxing graduates is not the way to make them do so.

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