As Eton and Harrow are judged to be failing by school league tables, are the rankings useless? January 29, 2015 Philip Booth, a professor at Cass Business School, and editorial and programme director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, says Yes League tables were an important innovation when introduced. The information that goes into them should also be freely available, so that parents can make judgements about schools. However, the tables themselves have served their [...]
Analysis: Why has Tesco chosen to shut these 43 stores? January 29, 2015 Tesco has now announced the 43 stores that it plans to close. 18 Express stores, 12 metro stores, seven superstores and six Home Plus stores. The closures will start taking effect from March. What does it tell us about their location strategy when one looks at the stores set to close? It is a [...]
Advertising has an image problem: Apprenticeships will help us boost diversity January 29, 2015 With 98 days to go until the general election, David Cameron has pledged to reduce the annual benefits cap to fund 3m new apprenticeships. Is this what business wants? It is clearly a good thing, economically and socially, to spend less on welfare and to encourage more people into work. To date, however, the creative [...]
London should turbo-charge devolution by creating a Thames City super-region January 28, 2015 Devolution is the flavour of the month, with plans to transfer powers from Westminster to Scotland sparking widespread debate about how else we can fix Britain’s over-centralised system of government. But London will have to take a very different approach to other regions. Yes, the capital desperately needs more fiscal autonomy, but it also needs [...]
Entrepreneurs aren’t lone wolves: Labour will back them for the good of all January 28, 2015 Paul Lindley looked at the range of baby food at the supermarket and thought his daughter’s generation deserved better. So in 2006 he founded Ella’s Kitchen, to create food for kids that appealed to all the senses. Since then, his daughter Ella has grown – but Ella’s Kitchen has grown much faster. It has a [...]
As Tsipras says that Greece won’t default on its debts, is a compromise still likely? January 28, 2015 Dario Perkins, chief European economist at Lombard Street Research, says Yes It’s hard to disentangle rhetoric and bargaining tactics from official “red lines,” but there is still scope for a mutually beneficial deal. The Troika could quite easily cut the future value of Greek debts by extending maturities and lowering interest rates, without imposing immediate [...]
OnTheMarket will need to win the Google battle before it can really challenge Zoopla and Rightmove January 28, 2015 OnTheMarket.com, the new property website from the Agents’ Mutual group of estate agents, launched with much fanfare this week with an apparent threat to the “duopoly” enjoyed by Rightmove and Zoopla. Zoopla, as the less well-visited of the two property portal giants, seemed in particular danger as one of the requirements of OnTheMarket.com meant [...]
Which visual aids should you use in presentations? January 28, 2015 Public speaking or presenting can appear complex. So many sources of "advice" all offering different and often competing points of view. It can be tough deciding what advice to take and what to ignore. I have seen people use multiple trainers and get screwed up as a result – choose one coach and stick to [...]
The City must stand up and be counted at this election: Its future is now at stake January 27, 2015 It must have seemed like a jolly jape, dreamt up behind the Parliamentary bike sheds. The coalition had a brilliant wheeze to stitch up the unions by introducing a spending cap at elections. No longer would Labour have access to limitless pots of cash from their union barons. Better still, the brothers would be forced [...]
Markets are crucial to human progress: We need more of them, not less January 27, 2015 Many outrageous things happened around the world over the course of the last week. But judging by both the level of popular interest in the story and the reaction to it, the most heinous was the decision of a mother to send an invoice to the parents of a boy who did not turn up [...]