Organisations providing public services are being warned against using the recession as a reason for reducing commitment to equality of opportunity. A report from the New Local Government Network calls on them to see equalities policy as a strategic necessity in developing high-quality public services.

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Plans to ban discrimination against carers have been welcomed by a national charity which says it regularly hears of carers being treated unfairly. The Women’s Minister, Harriet Harman, has said the forthcoming Equality Bill will include protection for those who are ‘associated with’ someone who is disabled.

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By Chris Game

This article was first published in Public Management and Policy and is reproduced by permission of the Association. http://www.cipfa.org.uk/pmpa/index.cfm

Local government is not well understood by the general public, with many imagining their local council runs the police and hospitals. The author looks at the proposals devised to improve local government against this background of low understanding. He outlines the move towards empowering citizens by shifting powers towards local community groups and for councils to become democratic centres.

Here’s one of those self-diagnostic tests to assess whether you’re essentially an optimist or pessimist. If you’re a believer in—or, indeed, minister for—local government, what do you make of these findings from a recent Ipsos MORI poll of Londoners? Are you encouraged that as many as one in four respondents expressed interest in becoming a councillor? Or depressed at over half thinking they had to join a political party to stand, almost half imagining their local council runs the police and hospitals, and just 6% able to name their council’s leader?
It may be a toss-up for some, but not for the present minister, who will grab the one in four and treat the remainder as a personal crusade. For it is an under-publicised fact that the middle name of our diminutive Secretary for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Anne Blears, is itself a diminutive of Pollyanna. And, just as the sunny personality and irrepressible optimism of her fictional New England namesake transformed her aunt’s depressing Vermont town into a congenial neighbourhood, so Blears’ mission is similarly to metamorphose our modern-day communities by empowering us all, individually and collectively.

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