I’m glad I’m not a senior civil servant. They must be having a tough week. I imagine most are in the thick of late-night phone calls, meetings and spreadsheets to sort out the spending review. And if my experience of an enormous cost-cutting exercise is anything to go by, it is hard to plan but far harder to execute the plan.
Yet I fear that despite all the hard work, we are not going to make the imaginative leaps we need to if we are ever going to provide high-quality public services for manageable amounts of money. The scale of cuts to departmental budgets is of such a magnitude that a complete rethink of many services is essential.
The internet is the organising principle of