Ifg Events Podcast

Governments often tackle similar issues again and again – from day-to-day matters to major challenges such as natural disasters, public health threats or global financial or security crises. So it is vital that governments learn from experience about what works – and what doesn’t – to improve the functioning of government. But extensive churn in ministers – and the civil servants who support them – means that institutional memory can be lost. In the mid-2010s, the Treasury was grappling with how to maintain and improve public service performance as budgets were squeezed. Senior officials in the department identified the need for a review of historic evidence to ensure they understood what the experience of previous decades showed about how to manage public spending effectively The Nuffield Foundation funded a project involving the Institute of Fiscal Studies (Paul Johnson, Rowena Crawford and Ben Zaranko) and a team based at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford (Christopher Hood, Iain McLean, Maia Ki