Parliamentary committee slams government for leaving councils high and dry – 5 key points
Councils still don’t know what their funding situation will be next year.
Councils still don’t know what their funding situation will be next year.
Report shows some departments falling seriously behind on communication
Joseph Cottrell-Boyce of the Travellers Project at the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain, reacts to the coalition’s new planning policy for Gypsy and Traveller sites.
Sir Robin Wales, the directly elected Labour Mayor of the London Borough of Newham, asks how ministers at the DCLG are held to account for misleading the public.
There is a sound argument to try to support greater mobility in social housing – only five per cent of social tenants moved home over the past year compared to almost a quarter of tenants in the private sector, though it is unclear what an ‘optimal’ level would be. It is also important to emphasise that it is councils and housing associations that will decide the length of tenancies, so the key question is how they will use their new freedoms.
The Coalition’s self-appointed champion of governmental transparency, Eric Pickles, has been criticised for failing to release information over potentially defamatory comments made about chair of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, who his Department of Community and Local Government (DCLG) accused of building her “career on incompetence” and “milking the taxpayer”.