Leeds City Council has approved its budget for 2021-22, which will usher in £87.5m worth of budget reductions alongside redundancies and a 4.99% rise in council tax.
The UK government refused a request from Scottish finance secretary Kate Forbes for £1.7bn of additional funding to support the Holyrood administration’s Budget for 2021-22, it has emerged.
UK councils’ efforts to tackle grant fraud are being hampered by the reallocation of resources to support efforts to respond to Covid-19, according to analysis from CIPFA.
The University of Stirling is launching a major new research project examining how local authorities procured goods, works and services during Covid-19.
New legalisation passed by Stormont will allow local authorities to set independent tax rates, giving councils the flexibility to tailor rates to local needs.
Covid-19 has left councils more than £1bn short of their expected council tax revenues. But what explains the wide variation among collection levels between different authorities? Kate Ogden, local...
Government plans to procure personal protective equipment before Covid-19 were inadequate, leading to hundreds of millions of pounds being wasted on PPE not fit for purpose, according to a group of...
Councils expect to collect £1.3bn less council tax in 2020-21 than they forecast before Covid-19 hit, after the crisis damaged some households’ ability to pay bills, according to the Institute for...
Local authority finance officers joined a recent webinar hosted by TechnologyOne and CIPFA to assess the role of digital technology adoption in helping councils respond to Covid-19.
This week, PF revealed that the Valuation Office Agency has halted talks over business rates rebates for offices – but the government could still face a bill of £500m to compensate councils for lost...
The Valuation Office Agency has paused talks over hundreds of millions pounds worth of potential Covid-19-related business rates rebates for offices, PF has learnt.
The UK’s death toll from Covid-19 this week reached 100,000. The grim milestone is a legacy of underfunding for health and care services, says Anita Charlesworth, director of research and REAL Centre...
Local authorities in Scotland are set to receive £11.6bn from Holyrood next year, an increase of around 3% – plus £90m to freeze council tax – according to draft budget proposals.
Universities in Scotland are expecting to suffer losses of £132m as a result of Covid-19 restrictions and lost accommodation income, according to new analysis.
Covid-19 financial pressures for local authorities in England totalled £10.8bn during 2020, as forecast pressures for 2020-21 rose to £12.5bn, according to latest returns submitted to government.
MPs have warned that the financial sustainability of some local authorities presents a “significant risk” to the government's finances, and urged the swift implementation of the Redmond review into...
Councils in England are set to receive an additional £120m in adult social care funding from central government to help boost staffing levels in care homes.
The Treasury has confirmed that its Dormant Assets Scheme is to be expanded to cover accounts in insurance, pensions, investment, wealth management and securities sectors.
Somerset County Council is to write to the prime minister Boris Johnson refuting claims by a county MP that the authority incorrectly used Covid-19 grant funding to balance its books.