The UK government is finalising arrangements for a partial hotel quarantine system to begin on 15 February 2021. This paper outlines those gaps and challenges, posing a series of questions the government must answer if it wants its quarantine system to be a success.

This report argues that relocations, particularly for public policy and other specialist roles, should focus on improving the capacity of the civil service by widening the pool of highly skilled workers available to it.

The coronavirus pandemic required the UK government to take high-stakes decisions under conditions that make good policy making hard. This report examines three key groups of decisions made by the government in its early response to the pandemic: the economic support package, the commitment to run 100,000 tests per day by 30 April, and the...

This report identifies four circumstances in which governments should consider returning a service to the public sector: an unhealthy or uncompetitive market; the need for flexibility to make changes to the service; a lack of government commercial skills to manage an outsourced contract successfully; or a need to improve the service by integrating it with...

The role of external suppliers in delivering services to the public and to government has been expanded significantly over the past forty years. This report assesses where outsourcing has worked and where it has not, and why, and makes recommendations on how to improve the way government contracts out services.