Following publication of the White Paper ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities’, the Government has issued an invitation to county and district councils to make proposals for mergers into unitary councils, or to be pathfinders developing innovative two-tier models for counties and district to work together. The invitation makes it clear that those councils in two-tier areas that are not pathfinders will be expected to achieve the same level of improvement and efficiency gains as the new unitaries and pathfinders will be achieving.The White Paper sets out in detail the issue that the Government is seeking to address. Strong leadership and clear accountability is harder to achieve where for the same place there are two council leaders each with a legitimate democratic mandate and often having different and sometimes conflicting agendas. As an example of the difficulty, it quotes Cumbria which has seven council leaders and 62 other executive members for a population slightly smaller than unitary Sheffield which has one council leader and nine other executive members.
CALL FOR GOVERNMENT TO DO MORE TO PROTECT PUBLIC FROM FRAUD
The Government is accused today of failing in its duty to protect people from fraud because it is refusing to spend the money needed to tackle the problem. A new report also claims police forces are reluctant to accept reports of fraud. It comes from the independent watchdog the Fraud Advisory Panel.
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WHITE PAPER WELCOMED AS ‘SIGNIFICANT STEP TOWARDS DEVOLUTION’
The future of local government has been set out in a White Paper, “Strong and Prosperous Communities”, with proposals for greater powers for councils, which will have stronger leadership but be more accountable to those they serve. Local people will have more opportunities to influence decision making and the number of targets imposed on authorities by Whitehall will be radically reduced as the Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly detailed what she called: “a new settlement with local government, communities and citizens.”
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