Simon Parker, Director, NLGN
The MJ
Over the past month or so, the government’s plans to reform the business rate have started to come under close scrutiny.

District councils face a historic test. As a group they face harsh cuts second only to those being imposed on MDCs. Top down reorganisation is, thankfully, off the agenda until at least 2015. But as budget pressures continue into the next parliament, a future set of Treasury ministers might well start looking enviously at the [...]

Reading the recent coverage of library closures, it’s tempting to think that the only thing wrong with these Victorian institutions is that philistine councils can no longer afford them. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, library visits have been falling for years – numbers dropped by around 7.5m in the last financial [...]

When the Transport Minister Phillip Hammond MP described train travel as “a rich man’s toy”, he alluded to the fundamental problem facing transport services today. The costs of different transport choices do not currently reflect the harmful side-effects they produce. In short, there is significant market failure and our current interventions do not produce a [...]

Financial pressures will lead to radical reforms in the organisation and delivery of universal public services over the next decade, according to the New Local Government Network. Transforming universal services, a new report by the local government think-tank published today, looks at likely changes to libraries, environmental and transport services, and suggests they will continue [...]

Our key idea for the waste service of 2015 is that we should expect service users to take more responsibility for the costs of disposal and recycling, but in return they should be given more choice and support.

Faced with a spate of closures which often attract strong public opposition, the future of libraries has become a focus of attention and heated debate for many local authorities. There is now a real opportunity to go back to the drawing board and reassess how library service should be organised and what they should do.
Daria Kuznetsova

With councils making plans to return to the bond markets as a source of finance, what are the prospects for community investment in local infrastructure projects? This project explores the potential for ‘general public’ or ‘retail’ bonds to be used by local authorities as a means of financing schools, housing, roads and other vital public works. The project will analyse the barriers to the creation of a retail market for local government debt, and articulate a series of policy recommendations to facilitate this.