Stonefield Review

An independent review of how public policy is designed, funded and delivered: energy, health, childcare, broadband and the machinery of local government.

This is a small independent review of how public policy is designed, financed and delivered. The interest here is in mechanism rather than position: what a given instrument actually does once it meets a budget, a workforce and a building stock.

Most of what is published here concerns energy and heating policy, the finance of health care delivery, childcare capacity, rural infrastructure and the working of local government.

Recent

• How a clean heat standard actually prices carbon

  Performance-standard schemes for home heating look like carbon taxes to their critics and like efficiency programmes to their supporters. The design detail decides which one they become.

• Weatherisation programmes and the households they never reach

  Low-income weatherisation has among the best measured returns of any public energy programme. Participation rates stay stubbornly low. The reasons are structural, not informational.

• What a hospital budget review actually decides

  Regulators who approve hospital budgets are often described as setting prices. In practice they are arbitrating a cross-subsidy, and the service lines at risk are predictable.

• Childcare capacity is a labour market problem wearing a subsidy costume

  Demand-side childcare subsidies raise what families can pay. They do not create a single additional seat if the binding constraint is staffing, and it usually is.

• Why town meeting government survives, and what it is bad at

  Direct legislative assembly at municipal scale is often romanticised and occasionally dismissed. Both readings miss what the format actually does well.

• The last mile is an arithmetic problem, not a technology problem

  Rural broadband programmes keep rediscovering the same cost curve. The density threshold where private deployment stops has barely moved in twenty years.