National Audit Office (NAO): Government Contracting: The Role of Major Contractors in the Delivery of Public Services - HC 810
National Audit Office (NAO): Government Contracting: The Role of Major Contractors in the Delivery of Public Services - HC 810

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13: 9780102987027

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In the memorandum 'The role of major contractors in the delivery of public services' the NAO sets out some of the benefits that can be achieved through contracting but highlights three issues that deserve greater public scrutiny. First, it raises questions about the way public service markets operate. This includes the need for scrutiny over whether public service contracts are sufficiently competitive and whether the rise of a few major contractors is in the public interest. Secondly, it highlights the issue of whether contractors' profits reflect a fair return. Understanding contractors' profits is important to ensure that their interests are aligned properly with that of the taxpayer. But transparency over rewards that contractors make is at present limited. Thirdly, the report asks how we know that contractors are delivering services to the high standards expected. In particular, government needs to ensure that large companies with sprawling structures are not paying 'lip-service' to control and that they have the right culture and control environment across their group. This requires transparency over contractors' performance and the use of contractual entitlement to information, audit and inspection. This should be backed up by the threat of financial penalties and being barred from future competitions if things are found to be wrong. A related report 'Managing government suppliers' (HC 811, session 2013-14, ISBN 9780102987034) examines the way the Cabinet Office is working to improve government's management of strategic suppliers.

Damages and Human Rights
Damages and Human Rights

Author: Jason NE Varuhas

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-05-19

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1782252819

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Winner of the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize and the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Damages and Human Rights is a major work on awards of damages for violations of human rights that will be of compelling interest to practitioners, judges and academics alike. Damages for breaches of human rights is emerging as an important and practically significant field of law, yet the rules and principles governing such awards and their theoretical foundations remain underexplored, while courts continue to struggle to articulate a coherent law of human rights damages. The book's focus is English law, but it draws heavily on comparative material from a range of common law jurisdictions, as well as the jurisprudence of international courts. The current law on when damages can be obtained and how they are assessed is set out in detail and analysed comprehensively. The theoretical foundations of human rights damages are examined with a view to enhancing our understanding of the remedy and resolving the currently troubled state of human rights damages jurisprudence. The book argues that in awarding damages in human rights cases the courts should adopt a vindicatory approach, modelled on those rules and principles applied in tort cases when basic rights are violated. Other approaches are considered in detail, including the current 'mirror' approach which ties the domestic approach to damages to the European Court of Human Rights' approach to monetary compensation; an interest-balancing approach where the damages are dependent on a judicial balancing of individual and public interests; and approaches drawn from the law of state liability in EU law and United States constitutional law. The analysis has important implications for our understanding of fundamental issues including the interrelationship between public law and private law, the theoretical and conceptual foundations of human rights law and the law of torts, the nature and functions of the damages remedy, the connection between rights and remedies, the intersection of domestic and international law, and the impact of damages liability on public funds and public administration. The book was the winner of the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize.

Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry
Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry

Author: Barry Pemberton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1317398076

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Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry explores the UK nuclear Legacy - governance issues associated with the decommissioning of a range of early-generation civil nuclear facilities. This book traces how we got here and the risks that have been taken, whilst presenting new research and thinking that is required to manage our nuclear Legacy. The book addresses a new analytical approach using notions of governance to review key historic events. This approach analyses these events using concepts of stakeholder control, accountability and regulation. Using these concepts and undertaking a more detailed analysis of the Legacy’s current governance arrangements; the conventional public sector-based solutions that attempt to harness private sector expertise, this book will contrast these with government responses to determine the degree of control over the Legacy and any possible control issues. Corporate Governance and the Nuclear Industry concludes that we need to recognise the legacy’s problems as exceptional rather than prosaic, and suggests that this requires exceptional governance solutions rather than the current form that is clearly failing.

Rentier Capitalism
Rentier Capitalism

Author: Brett Christophers

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1788739736

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In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as 'rentier capitalism', in which ownership of key types of scarce assets - such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms - is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today's economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism - vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation - are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers' examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.

Accountability in Public Policy Partnerships
Accountability in Public Policy Partnerships

Author: J. Steets

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-10-13

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0230290612

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A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. This book presents a new model of accountability which ensures that public-private partnerships don't erode public accountability. It defines concrete accountability standards for different types of partnerships.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018

Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2018-09-14

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9251305722

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New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.

Managing Public Money
Managing Public Money

Author: Great Britain. Treasury

Publisher: Stationery Office Books (TSO)

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 69

ISBN-13: 9780115601262

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Dated October 2007. The publication is effective from October 2007, when it replaces "Government accounting". Annexes to this document may be viewed at www.hm-treasury.gov.uk

Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change
Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0309380979

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As climate has warmed over recent years, a new pattern of more frequent and more intense weather events has unfolded across the globe. Climate models simulate such changes in extreme events, and some of the reasons for the changes are well understood. Warming increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights, favors increased atmospheric moisture that may result in more frequent heavy rainfall and snowfall, and leads to evaporation that can exacerbate droughts. Even with evidence of these broad trends, scientists cautioned in the past that individual weather events couldn't be attributed to climate change. Now, with advances in understanding the climate science behind extreme events and the science of extreme event attribution, such blanket statements may not be accurate. The relatively young science of extreme event attribution seeks to tease out the influence of human-cause climate change from other factors, such as natural sources of variability like El Niño, as contributors to individual extreme events. Event attribution can answer questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of weather event. As event attribution capabilities improve, they could help inform choices about assessing and managing risk, and in guiding climate adaptation strategies. This report examines the current state of science of extreme weather attribution, and identifies ways to move the science forward to improve attribution capabilities.