12 July 2002
Corry, who will take up his new post in mid-September, was recruited from a short list of five, understood to include another former special adviser.
The NLGN has also recruited a new head of research, Warren Hatter, who is currently deputy head of the local government research unit at pollsters Mori.
In an exclusive interview with Public Finance, Corry said central government was beginning to recant 'its centralist diktat' and was becoming more open to granting councils extra freedoms. 'There is a change in attitudes from the Treasury. There is an awareness that the services that the public want cannot be delivered through central diktat. They have to take some of the shackles off.'
Corry said one of the areas he intends to examine is the Private Finance Initiative. A well-known advocate of the PFI, Corry said that despite local government's experience of the scheme there was still 'some work to be done'.
'What we don't want is that instead of people thinking through what sort of services they are trying to deliver, they think PFI is about a set of rules made up by central government that they have to go through to get some money. That discredits it and leads to people using PFI for the wrong reason.'
Corry, a former senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research and a Chelsea FC season ticket holder, said he hoped to turn the NLGN into a cutting-edge think-tank. He said the NLGN had a role that other member bodies such as the Local Government Association had difficulty filling as 'they have to square a lot of people before they can say anything.'
PFjul2002
