Next year councils take charge of business rates and council tax support. As the levels of both are heavily dependent on changes in local economies, finance departments will have to keep one step...
Prime Minister David Cameron today revealed a series of relaxations to planning rules to boost housebuilding, including removing developers’ obligations to councils to provide affordable homes.
The government has been warned today that it is ‘missing a major trick’ by devolving economic powers to cities only rather than offering them to wider local government.
Every junior minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government has changed as Prime Minister David Cameron completes his reshuffle of the government.
Former CIPFA president Caroline Gardner is back at Audit Scotland, sowing the seeds of good financial management and tackling the public sector’s perennial problems. She tells PF that her past...
Community Budgets could be rolled out to all local authorities as part of the next Comprehensive Spending Review, the permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government has...
Introducing local pay into the public sector would free more than £6bn a year that could help create more than a quarter of a million jobs, the Policy Exchange think-tank claimed today.
The greatest risk in the process of closing the Audit Commission is that functions will ‘fall between gaps’, the proposed next chair of the spending watchdog has told MPs.
As the Audit Commission prepares to bow out, incoming controller Marcine Waterman explains how it is going back to its regulatory roots while continuing to protect public money and audit quality
English local authorities will continue to receive extra government funding to tackle homelessness in their area until 2015, housing minister Grant Shapps has revealed.
Councils have warned that their reserves will run out in five years if they have to keep using them for infrastructure investment and covering service funding gaps.
Councils have joined trade unions in backing the government’s proposed reforms to the Local Government Pension Scheme, clearing the path for the changes to be introduced in April 2014.
The coalition partners don’t agree on much. And the political perils of shrinking the state mean that small is no longer quite so beautiful, argues Philip Johnston
The coalition partners don’t agree on much. And the political perils of shrinking the state mean that small is no longer quite so beautiful, argues Philip Johnston
Councils could mitigate the cut in Council Tax Benefit funding by tackling fraud and error when they take over the system next year, Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles said yesterday.
Jeremy Newman, former chief executive of accountants BDO International, has been named as the government’s preferred candidate to chair the Audit Commission and oversee its closure.
Plans to reform funding of adult social care concentrate ‘too much on the inheritances of the children of elderly people’, rather than improving quality, veteran Conservative MP John Redwood said...
Councils today hit out at ‘tortuous’ European Union procurement rules that are ‘choking off’ opportunities to save taxpayers money and promote local growth.
