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General Reports and Other Publications
PASC: In a Report published recently, the Commons Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) calls on Government to begin to use deliberative polling to inform national strategy, and says Parliament should step into the void to hold Government accountable to the public’s aspirations in this way.
TUC: The share of the economy going to wages fell by more than 5 percentage points between 1980 & 2011 - equivalent to £85bn in today's money - while the sharp growth in inequality has meant that low & middle income earners have done even worse.
But a new TUC Touchstone pamphlet published last week (How to Boost the Wage Share) shows that new policies could close a quarter of this wage gap in the short to medium term, while in the longer term the creation of high-skill, high-wage jobs can close the rest.
NAO: The savings the BBC has made from senior manager redundancies exceed the cost of severance payments, according to a report from the National Audit Office for the BBC Trust.
However, the spending watchdog found that the BBC has breached its own policies on severance too often and without good reason, exceeded contractual entitlements and put public trust at risk. The report concluded that the severance payments for BBC managers have therefore provided poor value for money.
MO: Industrial pollutants have played a role in holding back increases in global rainfall which were expected with a warming climate, according to new research from the Met Office. The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, explains for the first time ‘why there has been no increase in global average rainfall over land during the last century despite a 0.8 °C rise in global average temperatures’.
It concludes that total global rainfall could increase rapidly in future if temperatures continue to rise and sulphate aerosol emissions from industrial pollution decrease.
ScotGov: Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has welcomed an independent report which details key recommendations for re-energising Scotland’s town centres. The report by an external advisory group taking forward the National Review of Town Centres includes a number of proposals to help breathe new life into town centres. The Scottish Government will respond to the report with a town centre action plan in the autumn of 2013.
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