Despite recent improvements, local government leadership is still far from representative of the communities it serves. Only one in five local authority chief executives are women, and in the political sphere women make up just one in sixteen council leaders . Black and minority ethnic (BME) groups and those with disabilities are largely absent from the higher echelons of local government - fewer than 1% of either chief executives or leaders are from these communities.

The New Local Government Network and the Centre for Women and Democracy are proposing a new piece of research that will take a fundamental look at the diversity of local government leadership and the challenges it faces. For further information please contact Anna Turley.

Public services are being devolved to engage and empower the citizen. The questions are how is this being done and how far should it go?

Both the current Government and the opposition parties are seeking to set out their stall on this territory for the future of public services over the next decade. But this is contested ground – new policy thinking is needed to understand the context in which personalised services will fit and how they should operate. Fresh exploratory ideas must point towards how local government and its public and private partners will be impacted and can themselves shape the agenda. For further information please Nigel Keohane.

This project lays out a vision for how Whitehall will have to respond to the various “spatial” reforms in order to succeed (these reforms include Local Area Agreements, Multi-Area Agreements and the Sub-National Review). The research will:

• emphasise how Whitehall can be changed to make it more alert to the partnerships that modern forms of local delivery are promoting
  
• identify the parts of central government that are setting the pace for devolved delivery and those that are more resistant to change
  
• facilitate evidence-based recommendations for devolved departmental responsibilities that give Whitehall a sharper more strategic focus and strengthen local government delivery.

  For further information, please contact Nick Hope.