About the Author

Sir Christopher Foster has been an academic at Oxford and MIT, a professor of economics at LSE, a consultant at Coopers & Lybrand, and then PWC, over many years and a temporary civil servant. He was in George Brown’s DEA. He has been a special adviser to Barbara Castle, Dick Marsh, Tony Crosland and Peter Shore. He advised ministers on the poll tax and rail privatization, as well as many more successful endeavours. He has sat on a several private and public sector boards. Among the numerous other public sector bodies of which he has been a member have been the Audit Commission, the ESRC, the London Docklands Development Corporation and the Megaw Committee on Civil Service Pay. He has written books on transport, local government finance, privatization and public ownership, and the public sector. His latest book is British Government in Crisis (Hart Publishing, Oxford; www.hartpub.co.uk), which was published in March 2005.