The Commission believes that, so far, councils have responded well to these challenges. Auditors have some confidence that most will balance their books this year. Many have also protected the most vulnerable people in their area. But with more reductions to come, and wider economic problems intensifying the pressure, councils need to prepare for a potentially rocky road ahead.

‘Good financial management and the continued search for efficiency savings will help councils navigate their way through this period, but they will also need to make some tough decisions about how to bridge the funding gap in the coming years.’

Local government faces three more years of cuts in government funding with almost 60 per cent of the total reductions yet to come. To meet this future challenge the report finds that some elements of councils’ cost-reducing strategies will have to change. In the larger councils almost half of this year’s savings will come from planning, housing and cultural services, but these only cover 16 per cent of service spending. These services cannot deliver similar savings every year. Many councils will face difficult decisions about how to meet their funding shortfall in the next few years.

Strong leadership and financial management mean that most councils should balance the books this year. However, many have had to cut back on services to secure their financial stability. Most local authorities are taking the right steps to make efficiency savings but have also had to reduce the quality and quantity of services. Charges are going up in many councils.
Although most councils are coping, the report finds that a minority of councils were considered by auditors to be ‘at risk’ of not meeting their budget for 2011/12.

The common characteristic of these councils is a combination of financial and managerial issues. Facing large funding reductions is not, on its own, enough to cause auditors to worry about a council’s financial resilience. It is councils with both big funding reductions and weak financial management that are at most risk of not achieving their budget. ‘At risk’ councils were less likely to have thoroughly evaluated their savings proposals and were more likely to use short-term financial fixes.

Tough times can be downloaded here.

It sets out a raft of policies aimed at breaking down barriers that hamper greater community participation from older people. And it calls on organisations to end the discrimination faced by older people, who are often written off when they hit certain arbitrary age points.

The author defends the concept of the Big Society, believing the policy has focused attention on the importance of individual and community action in society, but says that the Government must recognise the valuable contribution of older people, and encourage them to do even more.

Older people already make a positive and wholly disproportionate contribution to our society by volunteering, charitable giving and helping to maintain the values and principles underpinning our civic society. In the future they can do more to significantly boost participation and volunteering, providing the time and experience to transform our civic culture.

The report also says that the Government has a once in a lifetime opportunity to get the policy right and reach out to the baby boomer generation. It highlights four schemes that draw on social capital to provide care services in Japan and in the UK, car rides in the US for older people and adult education in Europe, which it believes provide examples of “best practice” and logical extensions of traditional volunteering models.

The report is available from Res Publica.

Using alternatives to travel can make good sense for all organisations. They can help to reduce congestion and increase productivity, contributing to economic growth, and can help reduce business travel, saving businesses money. They can help to reduce stress and absenteeism and have the potential to provide a boost to local economies and rural areas. Increased uptake of alternatives to travel can also help reduce carbon by reducing the need for business-related travel.

The report concludes that the role of the workplace in Government needs to change. Developments in technology, combined with an increasingly distributed workforce, are challenging the traditional concepts of the workplace – including how and where civil servants work. People, technology, and the workspace need to complement each other so that optimum flexibility in working practices can be achieved.

Broadband delivery is recognised as an important factor. The Government has committed to delivering superfast broadband (at least 25 mega-bits per second) to 90% of households in the UK by 2015, and has made £530m available during the lifetime of the current Parliament to facilitate this.

In recent months, Government has worked with existing suppliers to develop a series of business travel policy principles, which have been disseminated to Central Government Departments to incorporate into their own travel policies. These seek to standardise central Government Departmental travel management to drive efficiencies. Although these are not mandated, they should be seen as target values which departments should work towards.

In February 2011 the Government launched a set of commitments for greening its operations and procurement. Key outcomes for the commitments include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% from a 2009/10 baseline from the whole estate and business-related transport, with a specific commitment to cutting domestic business travel flights by 20% by 2015 from a 2009/10 baseline. This target, along with the travel principles described above, should lead to an increase in alternatives to travel measures as departments make greater use of technologies for meetings.

The report is available from the Department for Transport

The flexibility of the Adviser’s role has been key to its success with customers and pilot staff alike. Some advisers did, however, find it difficult to manage the tension of balancing work-focused activities with less structured, ad-hoc engagement and outreach activities.

All pilot sites have delivered the five core elements of pilot provision and demand for the pilot has been high. The pilot has made significant progress in preparing parents for work, in getting parents to think about work and in linking them into wider support and provision which they might need in the interim period.

Outreach has been one of the most successful elements of the pilot. Through a variety of outreach methods the pilot has successfully engaged a mix of traditional and non-traditional Jobcentre Plus customers.

More joined up services meant that parents had better access to services on one site, and this meant that they were often dealt with more quickly. Referrals between Jobcentre Plus and children’s centres services also meant that parents’ issues were not addressed in isolation from each other, but were tackled more holistically.

Partnership working has been strong, and has grown over time, between Jobcentre Plus and children’s centres. Partnership working with other local providers tended to be more limited in some areas.

A major factor in determining pilot success is also whether children’s centre managers understand the role that employment can play in providing a route out of poverty, and their role in helping to address it.

FOCUSED SERVICES IN CHILDREN’S CENTRES can be downloaded here.

Care leavers do not see themselves as customers, and do not challenge the poor quality customer service they expect public services to offer. They said that too often staff are unfriendly, systems are bureaucratic, and waiting times can be too long. There is a direct relationship between how a service is delivered and the way that care leavers feel about that service.

Where care leavers feel services are not relevant they will not engage with them. This demonstrated the need for improved communication to make services more relevant,
accessible and more approachable to care leavers so they can feel confident accessing services when they need them.

The report recommends supporting open public services and delivering personalised services. Realising open public services for care leavers means delivering on personalisation and facilitating care leavers to demand, and make use of, greater choice and fairer access. Care leavers can be empowered to be active consumers of the services they need if they are given the right help at the right stage of their transition to independent living.

The report is available from Consumer Focus

These predictions come from a new report by the Department for Work and Pensions. The figures also show that a baby born this year is almost eight times more likely to reach 100 than one born in 1931. A baby girl born this year has a one in three chance of living to 100 and a baby boy has a one in four chance.

In 2066 there will be at least half a million people aged 100 or over.

The message from the report is that it is no longer possible to look at our grandparents’ experience of retirement as a model for our own. Living longer means saving more.

Differences in Life Expectancy is available from the DWP.

The pilot programmes were set up in 2009 to assess the influence on child poverty of increasing employment opportunities for parents, raising family income through the improved take-up of tax credits and benefits, narrowing the outcome gap between children in low income families and their peers, promoting economic regeneration and building the capacity of communities to address child poverty.

Although there was a high demand for intensive family support, the outcomes were not always satisfactory. Employment outcomes were mixed, with the economic downturn limiting the opportunities for parents supported by the programmes and raising questions about the longer-term prospects of parents who have had their skills and employability increased.

There is a lack of broad and responsive provision that can support families to identify and address barriers to improved outcomes. Targeted interventions often fail to look beyond the focus of their activity, meaning that where a member of a family is engaged their wider and family needs are not recognised or addressed.

The programmes have been developed and delivered in a true pilot ethos, with local strategic and delivery arrangements that enabled ongoing reflection upon progress and learning and the amendment of delivery as a result.

Finally, time is an important element for pilot provision – to develop, to engage parents, and to achieve outcomes.

The report is available from the Department for Education

Participatory Budgeting directly involves local people in making decisions on the spending priorities for a defined public budget. This means engaging residents and community groups representative of all parts of the community to discuss
spending priorities, making spending proposals and vote on them, as well as giving local people a role in the scrutiny and monitoring of the process.

The report shows Participatory Budgeting was most effective when used in conjunction with other community engagement processes. It works best as part of a package of community engagement and empowerment. The report also reveals that it attracts additional funds into deprived areas by providing an effective means of distributing resources that funders felt confident they could work with.

Participatory Budgeting can also lead to different types of projects getting funding than might otherwise have been the case, and it can improve the level and quality of information available to service providers.

In order to apply Participatory Budgeting in new circumstances, policy-makers
and practitioners need to consider a different approach to its development and take into account the new national and local policy contexts. As Community Budgeting is rolled out across England, Participatory Budgeting processes could be used to inform the use of pooled budgets across a range of services in an area.

The report is available from Communities and Local Government

The Work Programme gives private contractors the task of finding jobs for 500,000 unemployed people annually on the basis of a payments by results system. It will form the basis for further public service delivery reform covering prison rehabilitation, drug offenders and problem families.

Service providers are paid almost entirely for results. The longer a customer stays in work, the more delivery partners will be paid, so there are strong incentives to continue support once participants are in work. The programme supports a wide range of participants and payments are higher for helping participants who are further from the labour market into sustained work.

Local providers are best placed to identify the most effective way of helping people into sustained work, and have been given new freedom to do so without prescription from government. Requirements for providers have been minimised as far as possible, allowing them to innovate and focus their resources where it will do most good.

Five year contracts give prime providers a firm basis on which to build long term partnerships with their specialist supply chains of local providers, and other partners, including local government. Putting clear incentives in place over an extended period creates time for these partnerships to invest in the infrastructure and resources required for success.

The Work Programme is available from the DWP

The provision of personal budgets for all eligible people will mean personal assistants, directly employed by people who use care and support services, working in new, creative and person-centred ways to play an increasingly important role in providing tailored support to meet individual needs. This document provides a framework for supporting the development of the PA workforce and their employers over the next five years and beyond.

The framework concentrates on a localised approach to supporting PAs and employers and recognises that they are best placed to develop their own solutions. It acknowledges the role of active citizens using services, working in partnership with their families, friends, communities and organisations to develop the Big Society theme and empower individuals and communities to exercise control over provision of local services. The framework explores the roles of national and local government, communities and individuals.

The framework does not prescribe solutions but identifies potential obstacles and barriers and provides good practice examples for overcoming them. Decision-making and further actions need to be initiated at the lowest possible level with the support of national government.

The framework is available for download: