Productivity
A way at creating a more productive public and private sector is by analyzing other countries successful political frame work for different sectors.
More money to the OFT to investigate why different sectors in other countries are more productive than us (plugging a skills gap, allowing more competition) while understanding our unique circumstances (Drop in public spending, historical differences) Can give politicians a better understanding of what to combat to increase productivity. 
This is also true for the public sector looking at why countries maybe spending less and getting better results (tax heaven, live in more highly dense cities, public have healthier lives) and can either give us direct policies to copy and see their success or try our own policies to combat these issues. 

Devolution
Devolution can lead to independence, with more powers going to regions. A way to try and prevent this is to split a region that wants to have greater say over it's future and add in regions that have a different cultural history and less support for independence.  

Rather than giving Scotland more powers you could split off the highlands to make their own decisions and split the south of Scotland and put them in two different regional governments with parts of north England.

It's harder to build a nationalist party that way and have less nationalism  

Defence of ideology
Trying to pick the best policies can result in not seeing the bigger picture and sometimes worse policies can help over all.
An example of this is redecorating a room all at once or gradually by buying new stuff. When having an image of what you want your room to be like individual elements may not seem good on their own but work over all, buying items one by one can result you spending more for the best items and they may not work together.

Imagine creating the most beautiful face one group A just picks the best looking person and group B picks the best parts of other peoples faces, best nose, best mouth, best eyes. Without seeing it in context it can be difficult to see will it work over all, the eyes maybe the best over all but do they suit the mouth?

If you were going to make a defence against pragmatism one point could be that its it wastes time deciding each individual aspect were you will likely make mistakes, not see the bigger picture and waste time not working on other things. 

The big society
The big society is fuzzy concept that appeals to many people but is difficult to create by politicians alone.  

Could greater integration from interactive social media and local communities help?  
Could having your Facebook wall updated about local issues by news outlets and local people help naturally integrate more people into local issues?

  

Zero hours contracts

Zero hours contracts can suit some employees lives, they can also lead some people to unstable lives with unstable incomes.
I might not even be possible to add clauses to prevent all the negative aspects of zero hours contracts without harming a few people who were very happily employed, just as the minimum wage wiped out certain jobs.

One way we can make the lives better for people on zero hours contracts is by any hours they work above their contracted hours would have to be paid at the living wage. 
If you are contracted for one hour a week and are asked to 24 hours everything above the first hour would be paid at the living wage.   

Do politicians like GDP too much

Not just GDP, unemployment figures, average earnings, these stats can hide so much that sometimes politicians hide behind these stats to get praise.

Politicians are under a lot of pressure to decrease unemployment but not under enough pressure when it is low to get people into better work 

If living standards are falling politicians are under pressure to increase average earnings but not under enough pressure to try and increase earnings for all. 

When the stats are in the politicians favour they don't work as hard to improve working conditions as it's harder to show that in stats or even increase the average persons wage as it's not a popular statistic like GDP, unemployment or average earnings when total wages are divide between the population. 

A higher minimum wage may lead to higher unemployment an important stat for politicians unlike the higher skills gap shortage what is harder to define, but if people are unemployed because they can't earn a high enough wage there is a higher skills gap shortage and now it's been redefined in terms of unemployment, a pressure stat for politicians.
It maybe possible that politicians would work harder to bridge the higher skills gap when they can see it's leader to higher unemployment than when unemployment is low and workers have low pay.       

The evolution of memetics ideas Ideas don't just replicate from person to person or person to stored medium to person but also evolve and just like evolution ideas can get into a evolutionary dead end.

One policy strategy can seem more successful at first to tackling a problem than an alternative (E.G. public heath care vs private healthcare)

Those the strategy you've taken could have limitations where it's difficult to improve on it, working yourself into a dead end.
Even those the other idea at first was not as successful it doesn't have the same limitations on improvements.

Forcing competition in safe seats

Having no real competition for a business leads to apathy from the business, less motivation to improve, meaning people who need the product of service they are offering are getting a worse result than if there was real competition.

This can be seen in wider elections when parties in power become less innovative and can become aloof to public feeling after wining multiple elections, even if you dislike the opposition, having other parties win leads to competition.
This is also true for safe seats for location constituencies, MPs of safe seats are less motivated to turn up to the house of commons, care about public opinions, etc. 

Voting commission
What can be done to tackle this problem on a constituency level? 
A possible solution could be tackled by the voting commission who decide on constituency boundaries, the voting commission could change boundaries in safe seats to try and add more competition if a parties wins multiple elections in a constituency.  

Getting the public out/in of government

Having no public voice influencing government can lead to corruption and leading politicians to feel aloof from public feelings. Also listening to everything the public says can also be bad when the public are uninformed and make emotive decisions.  
Locations like China and the west have took different strategies ether getting pubic opinion in or out of decision making. 

China do public surveys to work out how the general population like certain aspects of government and with that information try to work out how to elevate those problems within government constraints.  

The west has taken decisions out of the hands of the politicians directly such as having the Fed/Bank of England, NICE, Ofsted/FCC, allowing informed professionals to take a longer term view at tackling problems. It also allows these non-departmental public bodies to take unpopular views when it can be best overall.

Optimal pricing and taxing

To maximise profits you need to work out an optimal pricing strategy for your products, too much and you will not sell enough, too little and you will loose out on profit you could have made. 

There is a better opinion if it can be done and work out an optimal pricing for individuals rather than a group, so you can sell as many as you like, as long as you still make a profit and make maximum profits off each individual. 
Problems with this strategy is it's difficult to work out how to charge people differently without them feeling cheated and also find loopholes such as getting someone else to buy a item to get it at a discounted rate.

Tax
If you want to increase tax revenue without scaring away companies who can easily move operations abroad and not taxing so little to lose out on tax revenue, you can have a complex tax system were companies who have the money to move operations abroad can also use that money to decrease tax. Companies who don't really care about reducing tax revenue will not spend a lot of time, money and effort doing so but companies who do care and could move abroad will also be able to reduce their taxes and find no reason to move in the end.
Big companies who can't just move operations abroad and will unlikely move you should try harder to close tax loopholes for them.

You don't want to tax companies too much reducing competition and possible long term tax revenue and governments should try to reduce their spending by being more efficient.