After years in the offing, the election of the first wave of new metro-mayors means this once theoretical tier of governance has now become a group of six actual human beings. Their coming into being has not been without controversy – reflecting as they do the persistent need for central government to create new structures […]
We need to talk about fiscal devolution. Fiscal devolution is an issue that national politicians won’t touch even with someone else’s bargepole. So scared are they of the electorate getting a whiff of the prospect of a tax increase, that unless they’re freezing it or cutting it, they’re not talking about it. And local taxation […]
Since Theresa May took over as Prime Minister, local councils have increasingly understood that their future now resides in their own hands. The devolution agenda, once driven by the former Chancellor, has severely lost energy. Instead, the new Government has been heavily focused on Brexit and the economy leaving both public services and local government […]
Yesterday NLGN hosted a roundtable with senior local government executives and a handful of academics to discuss ‘place based policy’ after Brexit. The starting point of the discussion was work by Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker of the University of Southampton. Over the last few years, their work has explored the relationship between socially liberal […]
One entirely unforeseen consequence of last year’s referendum was the brakes being put on the devolution locomotive. Despite Government protestations to the contrary, May and Hammond have shown little of the true-believer enthusiasm exhibited by Cameron and Osborne. As a result, the already tortuous process of devolution deal-making has slowed further and in some cases […]
Like it or not this will be the Brexit Election: a strange sort of quasi-referendum on the decision made in a previous referendum and everything that has happened since. But if that’s all this election ends up being about, it will be a dangerous missed opportunity. With courage and honesty from the candidates for the […]
NLGN’s recent Place-based Health conference brought together many experts in local and national healthcare to discuss the need to move away from reactive health services, towards holistic, place-based systems – and the practical changes needed to make this happen. If advocates of this approach are to be successful, they will need to collaborate and take […]
We recently published our report on improving the productivity of councils, with a focus on collaboration. It’s been an interesting time to look at productivity in local government. Councils are at a point where they’ve already taken many of the obvious solutions. Anyone working in local government will be familiar with them: widespread workforce restructures, […]
