I remember hearing the visionary co-production pioneer Edgar Cahn talk about the defence of his National Legal Services Programme, the service that helped organisations to sue the government to enforce their rights. He had urged the programme over the years to ask...
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The peculiar mismatch in our public services
I get my gas from British Gas. It isn't a perfect solution, and I will be getting £53 of their vast price increase back, I gather. Whoopee. I can't quite get my head around why this tweak works, but it has made me think about the way our services are currently...
What if money grew on trees?
I listened to the Localis lecture by Penrith MP Rory Stewart this afternoon. He was talking about the importance of local action -if we are going to fulfil our promise to our children that they can grow up and re-make the world. He told the story of a small village in...
Co-production and the language of empowerment
'Co-production' is one of those buzzwords that echo down the corridors of Whitehall without necessarily touching the walls. It is an important critique of public services and a set of linked proposals to finding the untapped resources that can save public services in...
The trouble with evidence-based policy
I've had a go at a critique of 'evidence-based policy' in another place (as they say), and have not necessarily won the argument. What I'm trying to say is that criticising the specific ideology called 'evidence-based policy' does not mean that somehow we should stop...
Make your own Job Centre
Here's an extraordinary story. But it should be much more ordinary. The reasons it isn't have a lot to do with how we are assuming our society should be organised from the top down, by big (increasingly privatised) organisations, and with a fair degree of homogenous '...
Latest Publication

This pamphlet looks at how the UK is unprepared for a new era of crises and disasters. To illuminate the national predicament we look at lessons from recent history, and what we can learn, often from countries in the Global South, about the kind of local planning required and resources needed to be ready for when storms and other disasters strike near where we live.
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