Cardiff Council has been criticised by the Auditor General for Wales for not addressing weak performance in some key service areas due to what it called ‘fragmented leadership and management’.
Local authorities outside London must collaborate more if their regions are to achieve higher economic growth, a study by Grant Thornton has concluded.
Parish councils and the Local Government Association are to work together to develop community benefit schemes to manage the locally retained revenues from fracking for shale gas.
The health reforms were meant to create a fast-track, patient-centred service. Rising waiting times and A&E admissions – and confusion over GP commissioning and care funding – suggest...
England’s core cities have called for decade-long public service funding settlements to form part of Chancellor George Osborne’s devolution plan for the North.
Bad news stories are keeping the NHS in the headlines, despite the best efforts of ministers to shift the public’s gaze elsewhere before the election. Now two authoritative reports suggest there is a...
Government policies have put a rocket under over-inflated house prices while social housing’s share of the total stock has steadily fallen. So how do you rebalance the market?
Councils have been forced to abandon building projects, cut back on school maintenance and borrow additional money in order to plug a £1bn ‘black hole’ in funding for school places, the Local...
Rotherham council leader Roger Stone has resigned following strong criticism of the authority’s leadership in a report commissioned to examine sexual abuse of young children in the area between 1997...
Deregulation of bus services outside London has failed and new regional transport authorities should be created with powers to introduce franchises similar to those in the capital, the Institute for...
Policy Exchange has encouraged politicians from all parties to develop a plan to improve the condition of Britain’s social housing estates. The think-tank said decades of neglect had led to social...
Public sector borrowing in the first four months of the financial year was more than £9bn higher than the same period in 2013/14, figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.
Local government minister Kris Hopkins has today told seven councils to take action to ensure the publication of town hall newspapers complies with rules governing their frequency.
A £1bn City Deal for Glasgow has been agreed by council leaders and both Scottish and UK government ministers, the first such pact to be reached outside England.
Devolved administrations in the nations and regions of the UK are increasingly getting the blame when public services go wrong, but Whitehall still carries the can where division of power is murky, a...
Councils’ spending on looked-after children rose by 4% in the four years to the end of 2012/13, despite a 12% increase in the number of children they are responsible for over the same period, Audit...
The policy to raise the compulsory participation age in education and training to 18 next year lacks the legal underpinning it needs to be a success, the Work Foundation has warned.
Councils should be allowed to retain more receipts from locally raised taxes and to introduce new levies, the London borough of Camden has told the independent commission into council finance.
Local authorities should offer council tax rebates to people who spend significant time volunteering in parks and other green spaces, a report by the centre-Right think-tank Policy Exchange has...
The government's flagship free school meals policy faces significant underfunding after it has emerged that nearly half of all local authorities do not have enough money to bring their school...
A programme to support troubled families has been expanded to help vulnerable younger children get a better start in life, the government announced today.
A programme supporting families facing multiple problems will be expanded by more than four times to help some 500,000 households, the government announced today.
Some 36 priority housing projects are to receive a share of £850m to help get construction started, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles announced today.
