The Government has been forced to perform a number of U-turns following last month’s proposed changes to the tax system. This may succeed in making Whitehall dizzy but will do little to support a British economy that has re-entered recession. A smarter route map for growth was offered by the one City Deal that made [...]

David Cameron’s much-vaunted cabinet of directly elected city mayors will, it turns out, be an intimate affair. He is expected to be joined by representatives from three cities that since 2011 have voluntarily changed to the mayoral system – Leicester, Salford and Liverpool – and in the autumn by a new mayor in Bristol, where [...]

“One of the problems with the political process is that people do feel disempowered, shut out from it. We have therefore got to be imaginative about how we bring decision-making closer to them. The government is committed to giving local authorities greater freedom and wider responsibilities. With this needs to come strong and accountable local [...]

Cities across the country have responded to the wanted ad issued in the Localism Act. Politics outside Westminster suddenly looks very interesting. The impending referendums on elected mayors have grabbed the imagination and the headlines, but there is a quiet revolution in local governance that has been less commented upon. Developments in the Leeds City [...]

This is a government that likes big ideas. Its members have namechecked everyone from the nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom to the unorthodox environmentalist EF Schumacher. At the government’s heart, policy minister Oliver Letwin talks grandly about building a ‘post-bureaucratic state’. But liking big ideas is not the same as having one. Last year’s Open [...]

New Local Government Network Researcher Joe Sturge explores the opportunity that bond finance and retail bonds in particular present to councils. Investment in infrastructure and public assets – from housing to highways, from super-fast broadband to renewable energy – will be vital in driving economic growth and competitiveness in the coming years. Local authorities and [...]

The first wave of local authority mayors came freighted with high expectations. Proponents expected a governance revolution, with more decisive leadership and a renewed local democracy. Opponents feared authoritarian leadership and corruption.Simon Parker, NLGN

Some budgets are historic events – think of David Lloyd George in 1909 taxing the wealthy to pay for social protection, sparking a constitutional crisis. But in our era… Simon Parker, MJ