Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference yesterday showed more political will to bring a close to austerity rather than an actual end, writes Resolution Foundation director...
Local authority finances were unusually high up the agenda at the Labour conference this year but councils remain in a state of flux until the government realises the system of funding them needs...
Officers and members need to communicate and work together to find solutions to the many challenges facing local government, says Cliff Dalton, CIPFA’s head of advisory services
Theresa May has pledged to hand £2bn to housing associations over the course of seven years from 2022. Jeremy Earnshaw, chief financial officer at housing association Your Housing Group, writes about...
Ken Lee, chair of CIPFA’s housing panel, says there are plenty of actions the government can take if it wants to send a positive message about social housing.
It’s time for local leaders to come together and lobby the government on issues of common concern, says think-tank Centre for Cities chief executive Andrew Carter.
A reduction in child arrests is obviously good for the young people themselves - but also for public services, says the Howard League for Penal Reform’s Andrew Neilson.
Social care needs a system such as the childcare voucher scheme, says the co-founder of an international nursery chain John Woodward. He was also the architect of the childcare voucher scheme....
Some 80% of risk-related costs are often overlooked. Managing these can lead to sustainable financial savings, both directly and indirectly, says Zurich Municipal's Andrew Jepp.
By giving power back to the people and redefining their relationship with communities, local authorities can help themselves transform, says the NLGN’s director Adam Lent.
Business rates are broken and deter companies from investing to boost productivity - abolishing them would bring benefits to the public sector as well as enterprise, argues Lib Dem Lord Fox.
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.
On 1 April 2013 the government brought in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, which meant hundreds of thousands of people eligibe for legal aid became ineligible....
A huge amount of data is generated in the NHS. Using the expertise of data analysts to make sense of it could improve clinical care and how services are run, says the Health Foundation’s Adam...
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.
CIPFA head Rob Whiteman provides the first of our regular columns on fraud, looking at how countering this crime requires collaboration and should be a strategic priority.
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’s recently published civic society strategy was light on detail, says the RSA’s Ian Burbidge. Plenty of commissioners were already doing innovative, forward-thinking work without it....
Data analysis and sharing has the potential to transform services but public confidence needs to be upheld. The public sector should take the lead, argues Sarah Timmis of Reform.
In the last financial year the value of loans made by the Public Works Loan Board increased by 42%. The LGiU’s Jennifer Glover explains looks at why that might be.
