There’s enough brownfield land to build more than one million homes across England with new analysis revealing that a quarter of it is owned by councils. Developers are reluctant to use brownfield land because of higher development costs.

In London, a massive 40 percent of brownfield land with potential to build on is owned by councils, which will cause questions to be asked of planning chiefs and politicians who have constantly vowed to speed up development on these sites.

A new report by Daniel Watney, an independent property consultancy, has highlighted over 23,000 ha of brownfield land in England, with over 10,000 hectares suitable for housing.
Nationally, the sites identified have the potential capacity for over 460,000 homes. 25% of these homes are on brownfield land owned by the public sector – with enough space for nearly 120,000 homes.

Read more on DEVELOPERS FAILING TO USE BROWNFIELD LAND…

The National Audit Office is concerned about the risks in implementing the Universal Credit programme and the potential for £2.8b additional costs.

The NAO concludes in a progress report on the programme that it is too early to determine if the Department for Work & Pensions will achieve value for money in its implementation of the Universal Credit programme.

Read more on WATCHDOG CONERNED ABOUT RISKS IN UNIVERSAL CREDIT PROGRAMME…

The government’s flagship welfare reform, Universal Credit, which has encountered leadership and technical problems, is now recovering some of the time lost in the last 3 years. By Spring 2015 one in three of the country’s jobcentres will be taking claims for the new benefit. The timetable has slipped by 2 years and full implementation is now expected in 2019.

Read more on UNIVERSAL CREDIT MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME…

A proposal to link northern cities with high speed rail as well as by air and road has won the Great North Plan prize.

The winning idea is the One North proposal, which links Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Sheffield in a 15 year plan of interconnected transport infrastructure. The £15 billion plan covers air, roads, ports and rail and includes a plan for a high-speed east-west route, essentially an HS3, which has since been endorsed by the government. The proposal, which was submitted by Transport for Greater Manchester on behalf of the five cities involved in its development, won the George Stephenson Prize for industry professionals.

Read more on GREAT NORTH PLAN LINKS CITIES WITH HS3…

Mark Winstone discusses how technology is dealing with a growing problem in the NHS: photography management.

Hospitals often need to take photographs of patients to record injuries or the progress of specific conditions, e.g. of injuries, severe rashes, a nasty bed sore and so on. Historically these images were taken and maintained by in-house photography teams with their own-on-site darkroom, but in the age of the digital camera such facilities are being wound down.

Read more on IS THE WARD CAMERA THE ENEMY OF AN INFORMATION SHARING NHS?…

A new online project is calling on people living with mental health difficulties to blog about their lives.

People signing up to A Day in the Life will be invited to share their experiences of what makes their mental health better and what makes it worse by submitting a 700 word blog on set days as part of the year-long project. Bloggers are being asked to write about the same days. There will be further start dates starting in winter 2014, spring 2015 and summer 2015.

Read more on PROJECT TO GET INSIGHTS INTO LIVES OF PEOPLE WITH MENTAL HEATH DIFFICULTIES…

Over a quarter of the larger councils had to make unplanned reductions in service spend to deliver their 2013-14 budgets and there is concern about their capacity to make the further savings that are required.

Read more on WATCHDOG CONCERNED ABOUT ABILITY OF COUNCILS TO COPE WITH FURTHER CUTS…

The programme to join up local health and social care service suffered from poor quality planning and preparation. Consequently it did not meet expectations.
T
he National Audit Office report on the programme to improve care in the community and lessen pressures on health services highlights its failure to deliver better services for older and disabled people. The aim is to keep them out of hospital and avoid long hospital stays. However, early local plans for the Better Care Fund, which will pool £5.3 billion of existing NHS and local authority funding in 2015-16, did not meet Ministers’ expectations or generate the level of savings the Government expected and all plans had to be resubmitted. Although the Government’s early planning assumption was that the Fund would save the NHS £1 billion in 2015-16, current plans forecast at least £314 million of savings for the NHS.

Read more on MANAGEMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE INTEGRATION PROGRAMME CRITICISED BY WATCHDOG…

Public sector hiring intentions for the third quarter of 2014 have fallen sharply and starting salaries have either fallen or remained static.

These finding come from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in its quarterly Labour Market Outlook.

Read more on MORE PUBLIC SECTOR CUTS ON THE WAY AS STARTING PAY FALLS…

Kath Ryans explains how going paperless is benefiting finance and business managers across their schools and academies.

Paperless offices have been a talking point for many years. But more recently the trend has been gathering momentum with the government’s targets for the NHS to be paperless by 2018 and local authorities set to follow.

Read more on PREPARING FOR A PAPERLESS FUTURE…