The leader of Scotland’s local councils is to meet ministers on Friday after criticising what he called “the obvious wilful disregard for Local Government” in the new Legislative Programme for the Scottish Parliament.Pat Watters, the President of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, said whatever it looked like, the programme had huge implications for local government but councils were still facing threats. Calls for a realistic partnership between authorities and the Scottish Executive had gone unheeded.

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Almost half of England’s local councils believe there will be regional assembly government in their areas within the next four years and they believe the assemblies will take power away from them rather than the new bodies having responsibilities devolved from central government.The Local Government Association has surveyed all England’s councils, asking their views on the regional governance agenda and focussing on their current relationships with regional bodies. The survey also looked at the strengths of the English regions and the powers and functions of the assemblies.

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By Catherine Needham.Catalyst warns that the government’s consumerist agenda for public services will erode the culture of social citizenship upon which their long-term survival depends. This pamphlet analyses the changing government-citizen relation under New Labour and concludes that across a range of government activities, from communication and consultation to public service delivery, citizenship is being “consumerised” in an intensification of a trend begun under the Conservatives. It argues that government communications are increasingly promotional, as seen in Alastair Campbell’s reforms to the Government Information Service, energies devoted to departmental “branding”, and accumulating controversies over “spin”, distortion and misrepresentation in government-provided information. It describes how government consultations now “mimic commercial market research” in their reliance on “opinion polls, feedback forms and satisfaction surveys”, and “ask respondents to report their experiences as service users” and not to consider wider community, policy or budgetary implications.

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