The president proposed merging six government agencies dealing with international trade into a super-department, a plan which immediately ran scepticism

Michael Gove has never been timid in confronting the education bureaucracy, but his attack on them today is particularly — and noteworthily — unforgiving. Referring to those truculent local authorities that are blocking his schools reforms, he will say in a speech that starts in about ten minutes: ‘The same ideologues who are happy with failure — the enemies of promise R...

Ofsted's new boss must do something about the ludicrous box-ticking of its inspectors, writes Philip Johnston.

Questions mount about cost of Cameron's wasteful re-organisation. Labour have today published stark new figures revealing yet further evidence of the full cost of the Government's dangerous NHS re-organisation. The new NHS bureaucracy created by David Cameron's Health Bill is paying GPs twice. As GPs take on new roles as part of NHS commissioning boards, they are paid to attend boar...

Parliament has decamped for midwinter, but the business of government goes on. Today's announcement, by the children's minister Tim Loughton, is contained within a Times article here. ‘An expert panel,’ it reveals, will be tasked with designing a new system for assessing prospective adoptive parents by March next year.  That new system, making it easier for good parents ...

Public services provision in Europe is set to be radically liberalised from bureaucracy but will at the same time come under more scrutiny from the EU executive following two proposals tabled by the European Commission yesterday (20 December). More »

Bryony Gordon: A ‘Big Man’ chucked a teenager off a ScotRail train, but perhaps the real problem was the ticket inspector. It’s the train company’s fault, petty bureaucracy gone mad. Julie Bindel: The ‘big man’, the fare-dodger and the right time to intervene Intervening is community in action except when it’s vigilantes. Still, I know

A string of failed administrations and a lack of public appetite for reform have made Italy almost ungovernable, says Graeme Archer.

Serbia's new Anti-Corruption Agency faces high expectations to reduce both graft among high-level officials and the need for citizens to 'grease the wheels' of the bureaucracy to receive permits and basic public services. In an exclusive interview with EurActiv Serbia, the organisation's director, Zorana Marković, presents her plan to make institutions 'corruption-resistant...

Reading Fraser’s post last night, you’d be forgiven for thinking the BBC is running up the white flag in terms of its global reporting. Yesterday — as Gaddafi was breathing his last in Sirte — Coffee House was praising Sky and Al Jazeera, and pouring scorn on the BBC’s “stifling bureaucracy”, accusing us of being “short sighted”, “slow-mo...