For better and smarter public services
Find coverage in the press of Reform's latest work below.
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On 18 February 2019, the Rt Hon David Gauke MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, spoke for Reform on the issue redefining punishment and sentencing.
The speech received media coverage in the Evening Standard, Financial Times, Sky News, The Telegraph, The Express, The Independent, The Times, Metro, The Sun, Daily Mail, the BBC, The Guardian and The Week.
Reform's response to the publication of the Higher Education Statistics Agency figures on widening participation was covered in The Times (£), The Guardian, FE News and Cherwell Online.
Read the full response below:
Commenting on statistics published this morning by HESA showing little change in participation rates for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Dr Luke Heselwood, Reform Senior Researcher and author of the report ‘Gaining Access: Increasing the participation of disadvantaged students at elite universities’, said:
“If Ministers want to do better, they should do three things: find a better measure for assessing disadvantage, evaluate universities’ spending on widening participation and campaign to encourage applications from disadvantaged students.”
Research undertaken by Reform in 2018 found considerable discomfort from universities with the current measure used to assess disadvantage, which uses POLAR3 data. The think tank is reiterating it’s call for a new measure for assessing universities progress in improving access, which takes into account key indicators not currently considered, such as Free School Meal status.
Reform is again calling for universities to publish detailed breakdowns of their widening participation spending to the Office for Students, to help understand which programmes are effective and to improve value for money.
The think tank has previously called for a national campaign similar to Better Make Room in the USA, which targets disadvantaged pupils via text and Snap Chat to encourage applications from those with high enough grades.
Andrew Haldenby, Director at Reform, was quoted in a BBC article about the number of operations the NHS could be doing:
Andrew Haldenby, director of the public services think tank Reform, said: "What is striking is that neither the NHS authorities nor hospitals themselves are doing very much to improve the situation.
"It is possible that the way the government runs the NHS, hospitals are still not under enough pressure to strive for value for money every day."
Commenting on statistics published by MHCLG today, Reform Senior Researcher, Dr Luke Heselwood, said:
“Despite making efforts to tackle homelessness, Government departments are at cross purposes with current welfare policy exacerbating the very issue that MHCLG is trying to solve. Eliminating rough sleeping and all forms of homelessness will require a truly multi-agency response.”
Aidan Shilson-Thomas, Researcher at Reform, wrote an article in Public Finance about community sentencing. Despite a lack of sentence confidence, evidence suggests that community sentencing has lower re-offending rates, and is cheaper to implement, than short sentencing.
"Increasing sentencer confidence in community sentences must be the first step to building public confidence in their use."
Read the full article here.
On Tuesday 11 December, Reform launched its report, Making NHS data work for everyone. The report was covered by The Times, PharmaTimes, Health Service Journal, Public Technology, OnMedica, Practice Business, Hapia, The Kings Fund, Healthcare Leader and Healthwatch York.
The report was referenced in the Department of Health and Social Care's publication, Code of Conduct for data-driven health and care technology.
It has also been covered globally in Russia.
Commenting on the National Audit Office’s annual report on the financial sustainability of the NHS, Andrew Haldenby, Director of the independent public services think tank, Reform, said:
“The NHS has used extra money for day-to-day pressures rather than to change and become more efficient. Ministers hope that their new plan will be different, especially because some money is ringfenced for GPs and cannot be used to finance hospital deficits.”
Commenting on today’s study from the Institute for Government, Dr Luke Heselwood, Senior Researcher at Reform think tank and co-author of the report ‘Smarter Working in Public Services: The HMRC experience so far’, said:
“Retention of staff has consistently been a problem facing the civil service. Recent research from Reform shows that the civil service can offer a better work-life balance, enhance productivity and improve retention by doing things such as promoting flexible working.”
