Local government think-tank Localis, in partnership with Westminster City Council, today launched ‘The Big Green Society’, the latest pamphlet in their Big Society Series. The pamphlet sets out a number of recommendations for councils to both help encourage residents and local businesses contribute to improving their local environments, and change attitudes towards waste and recycling.
Buyers of new homes will be able to borrow up to 95% of their value as part of plans the government says will help get “Britain building again”.
The mortgage indemnity scheme, in which the government will underwrite part of the risk to lenders, could help up to 100,000 people in England.
It is part of a wider strategy to build more homes and boost home ownership.
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.
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.
Ministers have bowed to pressure and made funding available directly to the government’s flagship local enterprise partnerships.
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.
Chief Executive Alex Thomson comments on the publication of the prospectus for the Government’s forthcoming Growing Places Fund.
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?.