Councils have long supplied schools with services from finance to catering. With market changes, they need to act to keep this income, says Richard Harries.
Three-quarters of adults in England back free personal care for over 65s, and the majority think this should be funded by tax hikes, a survey has found.
Abolishing business rates and taxing land values instead would benefit businesses in 90% of English local authority areas, a Liberal Democrat report has claimed.
England has been “left behind” as other countries get on with modernising their social care systems for an increasingly ageing population, campaigners said today.
Two Northamptonshire councils have voted to accept unitary reorganisation, which means the decision can now be sent to secretary of state James Brokenshire.
The recalculation of local government funding allocations should take into account all the ways councils could bring in money, explains the IFS’s Neil Amin-Smith.
Councils are taking earlier enforcement action to collect unpaid business rates as they become increasingly reliant on this income, real estate advisors have claimed.
CIPFA’s proposed financial resilience index is too simplistic and will not provide a “meaningful assessment” of an authority’s financial health, local government chief executives have said.
The ruling over Northamptonshire’s library closure plans is a reminder that libraries are a statutory service – so more should be made of them, says Cilip’s Mark Taylor.
The long-awaited social housing green paper, published last week, pledged to support local authorities to build more. But the Chartered Institute of Housing’s David Pipe says it did not go far...
The government must reverse spending cuts to public health funding to tackle rising levels of childhood obesity in England and Wales, council leaders have urged.
