The leaders of Scotland’s local councils will today debate ways of dealing with anti-social behaviour put forward by the Scottish Executive. Looking ahead to the meeting the councils have stressed their commitment to ridding Scotland’s communities of the problem.The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities’ response to “Putting our communities First – A Strategy for tackling anti social behaviour” will be formally discussed at its leaders meeting. In welcoming the Executive’s proposals COSLA is calling for a balanced two-pronged approach to tackling the problem and is pointing out that not all anti-social behaviour is carried out by young people or by individuals from traditionally deprived backgrounds.In advance of tomorrow’s meeting COSLA President Pat Watters said nobody was more committed to ridding communities of the scourge of anti-social behaviour than Scotland’s council leaders and other elected members. It was corrosive and was blighting not just urban areas but rural communities as well

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A new report is calling for social services departments, the health service and schools working with disabled parents and their children to re-think attitudes and procedures which, it is claimed, are undermining family life. The report from a task force set up by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found that inadequate support, unequal access to services and the negative views of staff were as much a barrier to good parenting as disability itself.The task force was made up of representatives from Government, social services, voluntary groups and disabled parents’ organisations. Its members spent two years taking evidence from parents, professionals and researchers and their final report identifies examples of good practice, but also lists a catalogue of policy and practice failures that placed disabled parents and their families under stress.

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By Suzana Grubnic and Ron Hodges.This article considers the role of information and trust in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) ‘Pathfinder’ schemes in the social housing sector in England. It uses the work of Tomkins and a series of interviews with local authority PFI project managers to provide a critique of the structure of the pathfinder process. The authors conclude that the pathfinder process cannot provide information about willingness to trust and they suggest that this may be one of the reasons for the delay in the contractual signing of the first wave of these schemes.
Public Administration Volume 23: Issue 3. ISSN: 0954-0962

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