Councils’ annual performance assessments (APAs) that rate adult social care are to be scrapped after this year’s ratings are announced later this month.
The Department for Communities and Local Government have announced trials focusing on local flexibility in service provision and community-based budgets
Twenty areas are to investigate the scope for ?budgets focused at a very local level? and community-designed-and-delivered services, ministers have announced.
Three London councils have announced plans that could see them merge all their services and create the UK’s first “super-council”.
Alex Thomson, Chief Executive of Localis, sets out the guiding principles of Localis’s latest research project on local government finance
Alex Thomson said Tax Increment Financing which would allow local authorities to borrow against predicted growth in business rates to fund capital projects was not a cure for all ills.
So-called “community budget” arrangements, which will allow councils to pool budgets, will be rolled out in 16 areas from next year, the chancellor has announced in his spending review.
Central government funding to councils will fall by ?around 26% over the next four years?, the spending review has confirmed.
Council chiefs have made a last ditch plea for inspection to be slashed following research revealing some 74,000 pages of rules and instructions have been foisted on local government from Westminster in the past decade.
Following the Localis event ‘Total Place or Total Waste?’ at the Conservative Party Conference, Bob Neill spoke with Alex Thomson about some of the issues raised during the discussion