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There are two areas of expertise of great importance to the facilities manager – project management and the ability to manage the increasing amount of IT equipment in buildings. New training courses have been devised to address these needs and are described.

Locally based policing ‐ involving co‐operation with local residents and agencies, is a key requirement of the government's police reform agenda. This article reports the findings of an evaluation of one such initiative that involved residents in determining policing strategy on two urban housing estates. On one estate there were positive outcomes, but there was little change in the other. This appeared to be related to the range of skills possessed by the officers on the two sites.

Once established, street sex markets tend to be very resilient. This article describes the factors that generated an initiative to tackle street prostitution in an inner city area, and the tactics employed. Some of the measures were successful to a degree and improved public perceptions of the area but the overall model needs further development to be sustained.

In December 2001 the then Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR but now currently the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister, hereafter referred to as ODPM) issued the tender document it had promised for the review and update of 5/94 Planning Out Crime (Home Office, 1994) The specification was for good practice guidance on planning out crime to be written within 6 months. Notwithstanding this exercise, the writer contends that in the face of the research, literature, legislation and expertise in relation to designing out crime, papers issued by ODPM and the form of the tender document itself demonstrate that it remains uncommitted to many of the accepted principles of design‐against‐crime and to the cross‐cutting crime reduction obligations of the police and local authorities under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. The author anticipates that this lack of commitment may be evident in the forthcoming revised planning out crime guidance and suggests possible approaches to this potentially influential document.

Soon after the Lehman crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) surprised its critics with a reconsideration of its research and advice on fiscal policy. The paper traces the influence that the Fund’s senior management and research elite has had on the recalibration of the IMF’s doctrine on fiscal policy. The findings suggest that overall there has been some selective incorporation of unorthodox ideas in the Fund’s fiscal doctrine, while the strong thesis that austerity has expansionary effects has been rejected. Indeed, the Fund’s new orthodoxy is concerned with the recessionary effects of fiscal consolidation and, more recently, endorses calls for a more progressive adjustment of the costs of fiscal sustainability. These changes notwithstanding, the IMF’s adaptive incremental transformation on fiscal policy issues falls short of a paradigm shift and is best conceived of as an important recalibration of the precrisis status quo.

This chapter examines changes in US monetary policy uncertainty (ΔMPU) and fiscal policy uncertainty (ΔFPU) on stock returns while controlling for downside risk, lagged dividend yield, and time series patterns. Testing G7 markets consistently shows that both ΔMPU and ΔFPU have significant negative impacts on stock returns. Evidence shows that any downside risk, ΔMPU or ΔFPU in US market will soon be transmitted to G6 industrial markets and the impacts are extended to two months. These risk and uncertainty premiums should be priced in the stocks of the major industrial markets.

UNLIKE SOME of the expenditures necessary to become more efficient, buying a small business system entails many more alternatives to obtain the best value for money. It is important to know what the computer is meant to achieve before buying and to be certain that it fulfils this function after purchase.

CALL IT what you will, serendipity, accident, fortuitous chance, but add it to coincidence and together they will take some beating. This was brought home to me recently when browsing through fifty year old files of The Nation and The Athenaeum. In a vague search for something entirely different my eye was attracted by the heading, ‘The woman librarian’, a somewhat inelegant title to a longish letter to the editor sent by Dr Ernest A Baker on the occasion of a discussion at University College London conducted by Miss Marian Frost. Librarian at Worthing, who was at that time one of the sixteen women chief librarians in the country. And then, the very next day, there appeared in the November issue of NLW a note about the potential qualities of women librarians first published in 1889.