The NHS drive to cut waiting time for emergency care to a maximum wait of four hours is getting close to achievement. In 2003 almost a quarter of patients spent more than four hours in Accident and Emergency Departments. Now, it is less than one in 20 patients and it is predicted that at the start of 2005 it will be one in 50.The improvement has been achieved partly by employing more doctors and nurses in emergency care work, but also by re-thinking processes and the mix of skills and by better integration with other parts of the health service and social services.

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Local communities in the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods are having greater influence in decisions which affect them. The change is being driven by the single community programme which provides grants for community groups. The National Audit Office has looked at how the programme is working and in its report ‘Getting Citizens Involved: Community Participation in Neighbourhood Renewal’, it concludes that an increasing number of people are able to influence decisions affecting their local public services owing to accessible funding. The report also highlights the difficulties of cultural change surrounding community empowerment and calls for a concerted effort to overcome the barriers to change.The single community programme has so far supported around 25,000 separate community projects in the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods. 88 per cent of these projects contribute directly to neighbourhood renewal targets. A grant of 5000 pounds, for example, was given to the Company Fierce dance group in Manchester to start “The Boyz Project” to give direction and confidence to young black men through positive role models.

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The New Local Government Network report is the second in a series that aims to pin down the main implications of the Government’s new localism agenda across a range of key public services delivered locally. It argues that there are success stories of localism in education, but there could be more if head teachers didn’t have to spend so much time bidding, pitching and wheeler-dealing. Evidence suggests that government needs to think more laterally about the funding process – schools should not have to plug into such a large number of different funding streams to enable them to play a role in responding to the often localised issues that affect their surrounding communities. It proposes that a system should be devised where schools were given sufficient funds to enter the extended school’s arena and play a much wider role in the community than teaching children, especially in disadvantaged areas, without the bidding. There needs to be transparent funding so everybody can see why the funds were allocated in the way they were.The report is available at: www.nlgn.org.uk/publications

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