Increasing employee ownership and engagement is clearly a good social policy, but what excites hardnosed business brains is its irrefutable impact on a company's bottom line. Employee owned businesses are known to provide higher levels of customer satisfaction, better quality services, lower staff turnover, better levels of innovation, and they are more resilient.

I find it hard to have a reasoned debate on the role of the state in our political economy - which is what the discussion about size ultimately stems from - on the basis of percentages, or comparisons of percentages between nations/eras.

The political conference season is one point in the year when it's quite reasonable to feel confused. So many claims and so much talk; but with what real effect, for whom?

Austerity -- slashing public investment at a time when private investment is inhibited by a vast overhang of private debt and by a heavily indebted and broken banking system -- is indeed a disastrous economic strategy, for Britain, the Eurozone and the US.

The public sector, in my opinion is the most important of all the job areas in the UK, for they are the people employed to maintain some sense of order and safety amongst all us everyday loons who fart about on a daily basis landing ourselves in all sorts of mishaps.

During the term of the last administration the role of the private sector in helping the government deliver its objectives grew dramatically through measures like the public/private initiative and the much derided PFI.

PRESS ASSOCIATION -- The gap between pay rises for workers in the public sector and private firms has widened in recent months, new research has revea...

Public services matter. They are too important to be victim to poorly thought-through political whims. They are too important to be left unreformed. And too important to be underfunded.

Labour didn't do a very good job with its manifesto pledge and didn't do very good job of implementing Home Information Packs and there must be lesson contained within this very recent history.