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All eyes are naturally turned to Glasgow and the local side of COP26, as the pressure to engineer some meaningful climate change pledges before the circus leaves town intensifies. To this end, it’s a good thing that the big guns of our own local government leadership have journeyed, in an eco-friendly manner by train of […]
It seems to be an inimitable rule of thumb that when writing about urban regeneration, Lord Heseltine will enter the frame of discussion at one point or another. It’s something akin to Godwin’s Law on internet arguments rapidly descending to mentions of a certain infamous dictator. Heseltine’s Law demands that within a certain span of […]
In the run-up to the Autumn Budget, the expectation was that expenditure tramlines had already been marked out by the earlier promises made to protect funding for defence, education and health service budgets. The view was that the purpose of all the advance press briefing, a litany on everything from pocket parks to more bus services in […]
In the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Ferdinand Mount makes the point that although the UK has successfully bequeathed strong models of federalism and decentralisation to the Commonwealth and post-war Germany, within the country itself, the issue has ‘remained a fad for pointyheads’. Amen to that. A few years back, when Localis published Hitting […]
With the long-awaited publication of the Government’s buildings and heat strategy earlier in the week, we now have a clearer sense of both direction and pace for the immense challenge of making our homes fit to heat in the age of net zero. It’s a salient fact that even by 2050 we will still be […]
Why are we shocked when properties built on floodplains are inundated with water? Let us not forget what a floodplain really is. It is not just a piece of land near a river. It is part of the riverine system. And as the name would suggest, it is supposed to flood. In July 2021, heavy […]
For some among the Conservative Party tribe descended upon central Manchester, there’s a roar as deafening as the drumbeats and shouts of ‘Tories out’ echoing from protesters gathered outside the Midland Hotel. It’s the roar of internal complaint about planning reform and dissent at the direction of housing policy. In a way their external enemies […]
Anxiety about being left behind, abandonment in all senses, is quite a pervasive condition. The autumn/winter parliamentary calendar remains chock-a-block with legislative agenda to tackle the ‘left behind’. The Archbishop of York has dusted down his copy of David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere and begun the August silly season sermonizing on behalf of the […]
Whatever the stringencies of the next long-term finance settlement, we can guarantee that the public sector, en masse, will be spending upwards of £300bn in the next year buying goods and services – or one in every three pounds the public sector spends. It should be noted that the UK is only middling in terms […]
After prime minister Boris Johnson spoke of ‘catch up ketchup’ in his detail-light ‘levelling up’ speech in Coventry, Localis head of research Joe Fyans asks if devolution and local leadership can provide the special sauce required. To decry the ‘levelling up’ agenda for a lack of policy substance feels somewhat redundant at this point. In […]