Community budget pilots are to be rolled out to more areas although there is uncertainty about how many councils will be able to take part in this second stage.
Transport is hardly the sexiest policy area in local government. Roads, buses, bridges and trains are not the sort of things that excite people, despite the ever-present angst over timetables and potholes.
Former Care Services Minister, Paul Burstow MP, writes about social care and integration in Lib Dem Voice while referencing his contribution to Localis’ latest Policy Platform.
Local government looks likely to receive some measure of protection from additional Whitehall spending cuts to be announced by chancellor George Osborne later today.
Read the advice of our expert panel on how local authorities can prepare for taking on responsbility for public health next month.
I’ve just returned from an intellectual romp of an evening with Jesse Norman who, courtesy of Localis, gave a lecture entitled “The Road to EUtopia: Britain and the EU after the Bloomberg Speech”. The spine of his talk was set out in this morning’s Daily Telegraph, but its detail dismissed the EU with a kind of courtly scorn.
Analysis by the thinktank Localis has found that putting local authorities in charge of transport spending would lead to a better return on investment in infrastructure.
No-one would pretend that local government is having the easiest time of it at the moment. Not only are leaders and chief executives grappling with the most punishing cuts to grant in living memory, but some supermarket tried to pin the blame for the horsemeat scandal on councils ? not with any justification, mind you, but another headache nonetheless.
Jesse Norman sets out his views on Britain and Europe, ahead of a speech to Localis on 14 March.
Local Transport bodies could struggle to carve out a role for themselves, a think-tank warned this week. The comments come in a new report by Localis, written by Daniel Crowe and Steven Howell, with a foreword by Peter Box, chairman of the Local Government Associations economy and transport board.