A new VAT liability could cancel out the savings from creating national police and fire & rescue services in Scotland, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader has claimed.
Every young person out of work for more than a year should be given a publicly funded ‘Youth Job Promise’, according to the independent experts examining last summer’s riots.
Local authorities will be able to charge a levy on drinking establishments with late-night licensing under the government’s crackdown on alcohol abuse.
The £80m programme to equip frontline police officers with mobile technology devices has achieved only basic benefits and is not yet providing value for money, auditors have found.
More than 2,000 police support jobs face the axe in the coming year, ahead of reform of Scotland’s eight regional forces into a single national police service.
Scottish local government leaders have accepted that the country’s eight regional police forces will be merged into a single national service, but say councils must be fully involved for the change...
Councils are detecting much more fraud but there’s still plenty of places to hide, warns the Audit Commission’s chair. Criminals are finding new ways of plundering public money
The auditor general has been unable to give an audit opinion on the 2010/11 Courts Service Trust Statement accounts due to inadequate records on the fines, confiscation orders and penalties collected.
The lack of checks on small-scale spending across police forces poses a ‘major risk’ to public money and could damage the reputation of the police service itself, inspectors have warned.
Scottish ministers’ plans to create single national forces for the police and fire & rescue services could unravel if they are rushed through, CIPFA has warned.
The government has abandoned plans to abolish the Youth Justice Board and bring its functions into the Ministry of Justice, citing ‘considerable opposition’ both in and outside Parliament.
People want police and crime commissioners in England and Wales to prioritise tackling antisocial behaviour, according to a Local Government Association survey.
The proposed single police and fire service bodies for Scotland should be trialled in shadow form before taking on their responsibilities, CIPFA has said.
Measures to reduce the amount of time and money the police spend on paperwork for prosecutions have been hampered by their 'flawed' introduction, according to the National Audit Office.
The coalition talk might be all about small government. But in the real world, the unprecedented shocks to the UK - banking crises, terrorist attacks, riots - show we rely on the state more than ever