Blog posts January 2012

Dispatch from Crystal Palace: Good Taste Decommissions their Coffee Service

Alec Patton
Tuesday, 31 January 2012 - 10:16am

 

It is an uncomfortable fact of public service innovation that reducing costs requires decommissioning existing services as well as creating new ones. That is to say, you need to close things down as well as starting things up.

Sarah Gillinson has written before in this blog about the deep emotional attachments we feel towards (some) public services. Many people tend to dismiss these attachments as sentimental and therefore beneath serious consideration. However, it is...

Essential Guide to Squeezed Britain

Fan Sissoko
Tuesday, 24 January 2012 - 3:11pm

Yesterday, the independent think tank Resolution Foundation launched "Squeezed Britain", their annual report on the lives of the six million low to middle income households in the UK, those who are "too poor to thrive in private markets, and yet too rich to receive substantial state support."

The document sets out their current economic situation and assesses their future prospects. Backed up with original research and rigorous economic analysis, it...

Designing an alternative to custody - lessons

Aviv Katz
Wednesday, 18 January 2012 - 6:48pm

Since last June we ran an incredibly exciting, challenging and ambitious piece of service design in the area of criminal justice and substance misuse. I've already written two blog posts describing the project and the process we undertook with a range of partners. These included a local authority,...