Christopher Foster (economist)

Sir Christopher Foster (born 30 October 1930) has been an academic at the University of Oxford and MIT, a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, a consultant at Coopers & Lybrand, and then PricewaterhouseCoopers over many years and a temporary civil servant.

He was in George Brown’s DEA and has been a special adviser to Barbara Castle, Dick Marsh, Tony Crosland and Peter Shore. He advised ministers on Poll tax and rail privatization, as well as many more successful endeavours. He has sat on several private and public sector boards including 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, which was published in March 2005.

On 25 November 2007 he gave an outspoken interview to Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thompson of The Daily Telegraph attacking Tony Blair as the 'worst Prime Minister since Lord North' in terms of how he managed government.

For just under the last two years he has been chairing a cross-party 'Better Government Initiative' which is seen by some as a group of Establishment figures, mainly ex-senior civil servants. They have apparently been meeting in secret and their deliberations are to be released in a series of reports over the next few months with the first to be published immediately. The Telegraph revealed "Government departments have “serious deficiencies”; the combined output of Parliament and the executive contain “too many disappointments and failures”; and “emphasis on ‘management’ has led to more bureaucracy at the expense of substance” in the Foreign Office."