Ed Jacobs is a political consultant at the Leeds based Public Affairs Company and devolution correspondent for the centre-left political and policy blog, Left Foot Forward.
"Based on historic and global track records, trying to build a new city from scratch is a massive gamble," says Brent Toderian, Vancouver's former chief planner, and a consultant for several cities outside of the Middle East.
He's had his chance at all levels: as Treasury secretary, as chief economic adviser, even as a consultant to Wall Street.
Stephen Wilson, a privacy and security consultant with the Lockstep group, said: "You just wouldn't think that hundreds of people would need to know or have access to that database.
"Spitting is universally recognised as perhaps the ultimate degradation and it's bound to result in rather aggressive retaliation," mused the consultant psychologist Dr Aric Sigman years later, in some nostalgia-based clip show or other.
Insider tip "The best place to hear live music is the Queen Charlotte Pub [57 Addington Street]," says Jo Wallace, a local DJ and music consultant.
Dr John Dean, a consultant cardiologist in Exeter, says NHS doctors who supplement their income by seeing patients privately end up compromising their ethics because they have a financial incentive to recommend treatment that may not be necessary.
"Because the NHS has not trained or employed enough radiologists to keep up with demand, there has been rapid growth of outsourcing companies who mostly employ NHS consultant radiologists in their 'spare time' to report the backlogs of images which are building up waiting for reports".
As part of the process of academy conversion, says Barry Bainbridge, former headteacher and now consultant, governors should be asking very searching questions of the headteacher to ensure the necessary levels of financial expertise are available to the senior leadership team.
Barry Turley, a senior consultant with the political lobby group Stratagem, and a former director of communications for the SDLP, disagreed.
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