By Richard Farnell, Robert Furbey, Stephen Shams al Haqq Hills, Marie Macey and Greg Smith Although there is a growing interest in bringing faith communities into regeneration initiatives, regeneration professionals and faith leaders show a widespread lack of awareness and understanding of the detail of government policy and advice. The authors explored the community involvement issues related to faith communities. They set out ways in which social participation can be encouraged to bring benefits to the wider community.

Water companies have been told to learn from the best practices in the energy supply industry to improve the take-up of services which have been set up to meet the individual needs of disabled and elderly customers.A review, commissioned by water industry regulator, Ofwat, and conducted by the customer representative body, WaterVoice, has looked into how water companies in England and Wales were implementing the regulator’s guidelines on services for disabled consumers and pensioners. It concluded that most were following the guidelines in offering a wide variety of services, but that take-up varied significantly between companies.

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Local government has been accused of being reluctant to accept responsibility or take the lead in shaping good employment policies, by the country’s largest union, UNISON. It says local government employers are arguing instead for a leveling down to the worst practices operating in the private sector which will see no end to problems of staff recruitment and retention.UNISON’s criticisms come in response to the employers’ submission to the Local Government Pay Commission. Local government unions, said UNISON were committed to modernisation but employers were wedded to “old-school thinking”, particularly on the issue of pay and bargaining. The joint trade union response says the employers’ submission indicates that, far from modernising its approach to pay and bargaining, local government is heading in the opposite direction.

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