Ministers have bowed to pressure and made funding available directly to the government’s flagship local enterprise partnerships.
The communities that are piloting the government’s flagship neighbourhood planning policy are getting stuck into their work. Colin Marrs reports on how three very different initiatives are progressing.
Whilst national media coverage has focused on the National Planning Policy Framework, the local government community has due cause to cast its eyes to the lowest, rather than highest, rung of our future planning system.
Chief Executive Alex Thomson comments on the publication of the prospectus for the Government’s forthcoming Growing Places Fund.
Alex Thomson, Chief Executive of Localis, welcomes the Government’s Growing Places Fund prospectus.
Westminster City Council has launched a community governance review to look at the potential for establishing new parish councils and other additional forms of elected representation in the borough.
Planning is a Krakatoa policy. For years it lies dormant with only the barest murmur on the political seismograph, and then it erupts. And this summer it has certainly erupted – it cannot have escaped the attention of even the most cursory of newspaper readers that planning has been…
Ministers have ditched a key proposal in the Localism Bill that would have enabled local people to trigger non-binding referendums on any issue.
Speaking in the House of Lords earlier this month, junior communities minister Baroness Hanham conceded that there was ?barely a friendly voice? for provisions contained within the Localism Bill to hand local people the power to ?instigate referendums on any issue?.
As one of two groups (the other being a neighbourhood forum) able to develop a neighbourhood plan, parish councils will have a vital role to play once the Localism Bill is enacted.
Francis Maude has vowed departments would try to create development opportunities boosting local growth when vacating offices in regional city centres.
Outlining central government’s property strategy today, the Minister for the Cabinet Office said cost-cutting efforts to consolidate the civil estate would have to go further in metropolitan areas like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.