Nine Reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General Published from July 2009 to March 2010

Nine Reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General Published from July 2009 to March 2010
Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2010
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780215553737

This report endorses the conclusions and recommendations of the following nine reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General: HC 878, session 2008-09 (ISBN 9780102955088); HC 546, session 2008-09 (ISBN 9780102963250); HC 465, session 2008-09 (ISBN 9780102963205); HC 1028, session 2008-09 (ISBN 9780102963274); HC 962, session 2008-09 (ISBN 9780102963281); HC 86, session 2009-10 (ISBN 9780102963366); HC 293, session 2009-10 (ISBN 9780102963465); HC 216 (9780102963519); HC 452, session 2009-10 (ISBN 9780102963618)

Sessional Returns

Sessional Returns
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons
Publisher: The Stationery Office
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780215048387

On cover and title page: House, committees of the whole House, general committees and select committees

Ofcom

Ofcom
Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts
Publisher: The Stationery Office
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2011-02-10
Genre: Telecommunication
ISBN: 9780215556363

The Committee looked at Ofcom's management of its resources and also the outcomes for citizens and consumers. There is scope for Ofcom to do more to tackle persistent problems such as the volume of silent calls, relatively low levels of switching between telecoms providers, and limited competition in fixed-line telephony. Ofcom has successfully reduced its cost base, despite having taken on a number of additional duties. But, because it has classified some of the benefits of the merger as efficiency savings, it is questionable whether the scale of these is as much as would have been expected, once the merger-specific savings have been taken into account. Ofcom manages its expenditure within an overall cap, which is agreed each year with the Treasury. In most organisations the intended work plan will determine the budget, but in Ofcom it is effectively the other way round. This has the potential to incentivise Ofcom to make decisions based on keeping within the cap - rather than maximising value. This means that value for money - optimising the available resources to achieve intended outcomes - is not always the primary focus. Ofcom needs to do more to demonstrate its focus on value for money and to allow the taxpayers and companies that fund its activities to assess its performance. Ofcom sets out in its annual work plan the activities it plans to undertake, but it does not specify its intended outcomes, explain how its activities will achieve those outcomes, or set out how it will measure success. This makes it impossible to assess whether Ofcom is delivering value for money.

Pressurized Irrigation Network Systems in India

Pressurized Irrigation Network Systems in India
Author: Dr Mrutyunjay Swain
Publisher: Allied Publishers
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9387997324

The present book intends to assess the performance of Pressurized Irrigation Network System (PINS), the effectiveness of institutional arrangements for management of PINS projects and the bottlenecks for their smooth functioning in India. Since Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Telangana are the leading states of the country promoting PINS and MIS, the study was planned as an all India coordinated study covering these four states. The WUAs in the study areas of the selected states were interviewed to capture the dynamics of community based irrigation management. Under different command areas, the study analysed system performance of PINS with MIS such as drip and sprinklers in terms of their functioning, costs and benefits, adoptability. The study finds beneficial impact of PINS investment on cropped area, irrigation area, farm production as well as water and energy savings. The book will be very useful for those who are interested in policies and governance issues related to irrigation water management in the country and the selected states in particular.

When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out

When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out
Author: David J. J. Lynch
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-11-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230112277

Few countries have been as dramatically transformed in recent years as Ireland. Once a culturally repressed land shadowed by terrorism and on the brink of economic collapse, Ireland finally emerged in the late 1990s as the fastest-growing country in Europe, with the typical citizen enjoying a higher standard of living than the average Brit. Just a few years after celebrating their newly-won status among the world's richest societies, the Irish are now saddled with a wounded, shrinking economy, soaring unemployment, and ruined public finances. After so many centuries of impoverishment, how did the Irish finally get rich, and how did they then fritter away so much so quickly? Veteran journalist David J. Lynch offers an insightful, character-driven narrative of how the Irish boom came to be and how it went bust. He opens our eyes to a nation's downfall through the lived experience of individual citizens: the people responsible for the current crisis as well as the ordinary men and women enduring it.

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries
Author: Kate Oakley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2015-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317533984

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship on the cultural industries and seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the ‘creative industries’. Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically-informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries. A range of cultural industries are explored, from videogames to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants. The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction. By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries this collection of contemporary scholarship provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field.

The Development of British Defence Policy

The Development of British Defence Policy
Author: David Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2016-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317036018

Britain's military forces have rarely been busier. It is therefore crucial to understand the developing trends and underlying assumptions of British Defence Policy, in regard to both foreign policy and international security. This volume, which covers both the Blair and Brown eras in defence policy making, places developments post 11 September in a wider context, assessing the impact of key personalities and events on a range of issues, notably the perennial concern of military overstretch. By critically appraising contemporary developments, and examining the driving policy in specific cases, this volume provides a relevant and up-to-date assessment of this vital policy area. As well as being contemporary in its analysis, the work is also comprehensive in scope, embracing both policy objectives - such as the expeditionary strategy and the desire to be a bridge between the US and EU - and the instruments that underpin such policy.

The Way the Money Goes

The Way the Money Goes
Author: Christopher Hood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-10-19
Genre:
ISBN: 0198865082

The Way the Money Goes traces out what happened to the UK's fiscal constitution - the framework for planning and controlling public spending - under three different governments (Conservative, Labour, Conservative/Liberal Democrat) from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. The book tells the story of what happened under each government and combines narrative with vignettes that range from the funding of a new Treasury building to efforts to 'crowdsource' ideas for spending cuts. It also includes chapters devoted to different domains of spending control, namely capital spending, spending by subnational governments, running cost expenditure, fiscal forecasting, and the development of new accounting metrics. This book is based on over 120 in-depth interviews of civil servants and ministers who were involved in public spending over the period, as well as documents from the same timeframe. It explores how and why, despite much talk of change and reform in everything from parliamentary procedure to bureaucratic processes, many of the underlying features of the UK's fiscal constitution persisted, including arrangements for formula-funding of the different countries within the union designed as a temporary stopgap in the transition to devolution. To put UK developments into perspective, the book includes a discussion of how the UK system was rated in reports from international bodies over the period, which suggests that in such exercises the more 'political' parts of the fiscal constitution were rated differently from the more 'technocratic' parts. Given several volcanic-type political eruptions in the UK over recent years, the book concludes by exploring some different possible scenarios for the future of its fiscal constitution in the light of those and other possible eruptions to come.