NEW PROGRAMME TO HELP MARGINALISED GROUPS

The Home Office has launched a new programme ‘Improving Reach’ to support black and minority ethnic, refugee and migrant and faith groups who are failing to access infrastructure funding in the ChangeUp programme. The programme was created to help thousands of voluntary and community organizations who work selflessly to improve lives in their communities. It is expected that up to 80 awards will be made from the 6 million pound fund which will be managed by Capacitybuilders, the agency established by the Home Office to administer ChangeUp.

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MOVE MORE LOCAL DECISION MAKING OUT OF THE POLITICAL ARENA

Local communities should be empowered to have a direct input into the management of their local services and decisions should not be made on purely political grounds. This call for change comes from the National Federation of Arms Length Management Organisations, representing 60 organisations responsible for over 906,000 council properties across England.

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The Task Force report gives guidance for those involved in the commissioning, procurement, contracting and regulation of health and social care services across the statutory and third sectors.The report makes it clear that commissioners must be able to identify a diversity of providers based on quality, user need and value for money. Care is needed to ensure that smaller, vulnerable, community based organisations are not exposed to undue risk. Better commissioning of third sector organisations results in better commissioning overall and this should help to widen commissioning from a more diverse range of providers and so better meet the needs of the local community.

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DEBT RECOVERY SPEED-UP

Vehicles are often among the major assets of debtors, but recovering debt in this way can be time consuming and slow. A debt recovery service has been launched by Shergroup, a High Court enforcement agency, to help local authorities and other public bodies to track down debtor’s vehicles, with a view to seizing them and selling them at auction.

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CBI CALLS FOR MORE LOCAL CONTROL BY COMMUNITIES

A report from the Confederation of British Industries calls for local communities to be given more say over their public services. The report ‘Transforming local services’ says that empowering local people and creating responsive local services is achievable, providing that the practical issues of doing so are tackled properly.

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Edited by John CraigThe essays in this collection draw on examples from across the public sector and beyond to explore the challenges professionals and citizens face and where their conversations might lead. They provide practical examples of how their encounters might help citizen autonomy and professional autonomy to grow together.

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THINK TANK CRITICISES SOUTH EAST HOUSEBUILDING PLANS

The Government needs to re-think the ambition of its plans for housing in the ‘Growth Areas’ of South East England. This is the main finding from a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research. In the report ‘Would you live here? Making the Growth Areas communities of choice’ it argues that the planned build of 200,000 homes by 2016 should be increased by a further 217,000. The growth areas are The Thames Gateway, Milton Keynes and South Midlands, the London, Stanstead, Cambridge, Peterborough corridor and Ashford.

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COUNCILS BECOME PFI INVESTORS

The great debate about the use of private money to fund public projects with the emphasis on the benefits for the private investor and the poor deal for the taxpayer, has now entered a new phase as local councils take on the Public Finance Initiative investor role. Recent months have seen a spate of local authorities financing and building state of the art health facilities for other public bodies to pay back over the long term. Councils up and down the country are now investigating how they could replicate these new PFI projects across England.

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This review from the Audit Commission has demonstrated both the weaknesses in the current system and the need for change. Many of the flexibilities that enabled bodies to meet their statutory duties not to overspend, have either been eroded or have disappeared for good reason. Over time there has also been less of a focus on financial management both nationally and in some organisations. In some cases financial problems have been obscured. A growing number of organisations have incurred deficits of increasing size, which has resulted in the NHS overall overspending by 536 million pounds according to the unaudited accounts for 2005/06. It appears to be increasingly hard for organisations to recover financially.The Commission’s recommendations include scrapping resource accounting and budgeting and replacing it with a financial regime that gives greater emphasis to cash and liquidity and has transparent arrangements for borrowing for both investment and working capital. There should be a more effective and swifter mechanism for identifying and dealing with financial distress, with clear trigger points and matched intervention strategies. Specific steps should also be taken to improve the skills of finance staff and the capacity and capability of boards.

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DO IT YOURSELF SOFTWARE IS DISAPPEARING FROM TOWN HALLS

Software developed ‘in house’ in being used by progressively fewer local authorities. The trend towards buying in application software has been accelerated by appearance of more applications in the market place. These findings come from a survey of councils, fire authorities, police forces and housing associations by the Society of IT Management. There was an 80% response to the survey.

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