Former local government minister David Miliband, giving the John Smith Memorial Lecture said that the government has not done enough to transfer powers to local government.
Under the Conservative plans, the viability of post offices would be judged against new guidelines including determining whether they offer a social service to the elderly and young families.
The new policy is part of a range of measures they will unveil as part of a strategy to deal with what they say is Labour’s “decade of disrespect” towards the countryside.
A Conservative Government would make quangos more democratically accountable, David Cameron announced today as he unveiled a review of publicly-funded independent bodies to determine which should be scrapped or slimmed down.
Council house building is to restart in earnest for the first time in almost 20 years in England with local authorities set to construct 139,000 homes over the next decade.
There is a huge demand for increased support and growth of the social and environmental market, and given its mutual aims, local government is the best-placed industry to reconnect markets and morals.
A key element of Gordon Brown’s strategy to win the next general election is probably illegal, according to expert analysis commissioned by the UK’s equality watchdog and seen by the Observer.
The British problem, so the aphorism has it, is that we want Swedish levels of public service with US levels of tax. So do the Swedes. That’s why, during a fiscal crisis with many parallels to our own – when the Swedish Social Democratic Party, then in opposition, promised spending cuts to eliminate a huge budget deficit – its electoral support fell five percentage points.
The crisis in the public finances will push back the boundaries of the state, allowing the private sector to bid for contracts in areas as delicate as chemotherapy, kidney dialysis and the supervision of probation and immigration cases, according to several of the government’s biggest suppliers
Police chiefs have been ridiculed for “inexcusable gobbledegook” for writing a 102-word sentence which “defies understanding. The comment, from the Association of Chief Police Officers, was so ridiculous it has now been put forward for the Golden Bull awards run by the Plain English Campaign.
Elderly people will no longer be forced to sell their homes to pay for care under government proposals to be unveiled next week in a long awaited green paper on tackling the spiralling cost of care for an ageing population.