An online discussion forum has been launched so people with an interest in the future of local strategic partnerships and other local government issues can feed their views into the final week of consultations on the future of LSPs. The forum is a pilot and its success is being evaluated by the Hansard Society as part of a Department for Constitutional Affairs project looking into the use of information and communication technology by central government.People are being invited to give views on five questions from the consultation and the forum offers them the chance to discuss other LSP-related topics. The forum – Ispforum.net will continue after Friday’s deadline for the consultation as part of the wider e-democracy exercise.
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Local authorities are being urged to toughen up over unpaid fines for environmental crimes such as littering and dog fouling. Local Government leaders have responded by saying some smaller authorities need help to tackle non-payers and the cost of court action to recover fines often makes the action wasteful. They claim, though, that all councils will be making improvements when their full powers to issue fixed penalty notices come into force in April.In a speech to the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign’s Cleaner, Safer, Greener conference, Mr. Bradshaw said he was disturbed to discover that of the 20,000 fixed penalty notices issued for littering, dog fouling, graffiti and fly-posting, 8,000 had not been paid. Details of the fixed penalty notices issued in 2004-05 by every local authority are now available on the Defra website.
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