The LGA has produced a list of 250 words that council staff should not use, including ‘trialogue’, ‘webinar’, ‘clienting’ and phrases such as ‘goldfish bowl facilitated conversation’. Mr. Taylor said getting rid of obviously meaningless jargon was admirable but added that the banned list would not really help. “It’ll just get replaced with another set of nonsense, which may be one of the reasons the LGA has been producing this list for several years now,” he added.

He said a better goal would be to try to change the culture of the public sector. Getting staff to think like normal people would help them to communicate with normal people. “Plain English is a step in the right direction, but it can be very uninspiring. Engaging language is the most effective,” he said.

The LGA said the words on its latest list had been taken from the European Union, central government, quangos, regional government, business management speak and public relations phrases. While there was a place for technical language, jargon had to be removed from documents and publications aimed at the public. The LGA chairman, Margaret Eaton said: “During the recession, it is vital that we explain to people in plain English how to get access to the services the public sector provides with taxpayers’ money.”

The authorities are in several areas of England, including four in Cumbria, the scene of the most recent serious flooding. The Grant Scheme is part of the Government response to Sir Michael Pitt’s review of the 2007 floods.

The second phase of grants will go to 34 projects in areas at high risk of flooding. It will allow 532 households to install practical measures such as airbrick covers, storm porches, door guards and flood boards. The first round of 3 million pounds in funding went to 25 councils to protect almost 600 homes.

Environment Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, said there were 490,000 properties at significant risk of river or coastal flooding in England and since 2007 action had been taken on a range of fronts to prevent the heart breaking damage and destruction that could be caused by floods. “In the future we must be prepared for more extreme weather on all levels,” he said.

The Environment Agency Director of Flood and Coastal Risk Management, Robert Runcie, welcomed the latest funding and urged individuals and businesses at risk of flooding to make their property more resistant as well as to sign up to the Agency’s free flood warning service.

The group said the link would cut the journey time from London to Cardiff to about 70 minutes and mean a trip from London to Bristol would take an hour. The partnership is focussing particularly on the benefits a high-speed line would have on the knowledge-based employment sector and on general employment growth.

Bristol City Council leader Barbara Janke said high-speed rail was essential to grow Bristol’s and Cardiff’s regional economies. “We have clear examples from Europe and elsewhere of the benefits this can bring. Indeed, if we fail to secure this investment I believe our economies will suffer in relation to other UK regions,” she added. She welcomed the opportunity to work closely with South Wales and Cardiff and said: “We are forging closer links through a range of initiatives and I hope and believe that this is the beginning of much closer collaboration on many shared issues in the future.”

Cardiff Council leader, Rodney Berman, said the UK’s core cities needed to stand together to campaign for a transportation system fit for the 21st century. Swindon Borough Council’s Cabinet Member for Sustainability, Transport and Strategic Planning, Peter Greenhalgh, urged the Government to consider the line so that people living outside London to the West could enjoy the benefits of people in the South East.

The Welsh Social Justice and Local Government Minister, Carl Sargeant, said that in future for a building to be liable for business rates rather than council tax, it would have to be let for a minimum of 70 days during the previous 12 months. Charges on this type of property are often significantly lower than council tax and the Assembly Government believes some owners reduce the amount of tax they pay by declaring a property is available for let but making little effort to find tenants.

It is concerned that premises that are empty for much of the year have a negative impact on their local communities as they do not have occupants who buy local goods and services and who contribute to the community. Mr. Sargeant said: “This legislation is crucial as it closes a potential tax avoidance loophole, while not adversely affecting the taxation liability of genuine businesses.”

He recognised the importance of a thriving tourism sector to the Welsh economy and said more than 95 per cent of self-catering properties that were liable to pay business rates already benefited from rates relief funded by the Assembly Government. Most of them paid rates of less than 10 pounds a week.

The committee’s chairman, the Conservative MP Edward Leigh said it was extremely doubtful that the initiatives were achieving value for money. He accepted, however, that the challenge of regenerating the areas was an enormous one. Since 1981 more than 120 pits had closed, leaving a legacy of derelict land some of which was highly contaminated and in areas with low economic potential and high unemployment allied with a weak culture of enterprise.

Mr. Leigh added: “Despite spending 630 million pounds so far, and 13 years after the launch of the initiatives, the Department still does not really know what improvement it has made to the lives of the people living in these areas.”

The report, published today, says that reviving the former English coalfields is one of the largest regeneration challenges to face the country over the last 30 years. As at July last year the three initiatives had brought 54 former coalfield sites back into working use and enabled private development of 2,700 houses and 1.1 million square metres of employment space. They had also given financial support to around 3,000 community projects.

The MPs say they have serious concerns about the value for money of the initiatives and that the Department does not know what improvement they have made because it does not have a robust assessment framework to establish the true number of additional jobs created.

Over the next two days the delegates will look in detail at rural development in practice and hear from a range of speakers drawn from the various rural networks across Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. They will be joined by representatives from the European Network for Rural Development.

The conference has been devised for people who are actively involved in the delivery of Rural Development Programmes. Rebecca Frost, from the Rural Development Programme for England, hailed the significance of the event and pointed out that the programmes for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were worth in excess of 6.7 billion pounds to the UK rural economy. This huge investment would contribute to many aspects of rural life, including food and farming, the environment, rural tourism, business, services and village renewal.

She added: “It represents the first integrated single rural fund programme in the UK and offers a variety of opportunities and measures in support of rural development. This conference is designed to bring together the key delivery stakeholders of these rural development programmes to enable the sharing and networking of practice with the ultimate objective of helping to ensure that the programmes can make a real and tangible difference to rural life and rural people.”

The NLGN report says it is imperative that central government now makes the changes that would make it possible for tenants who sub-let their homes to be prosecuted for fraud. That step, it says, would enable local authorities to galvanise their efforts and minimise the high social and financial costs of tenancy fraud, which it puts at 750 million pounds.

In the report, ‘Don’t Let On’, the author Tom Symons says that sub-letting and the fact that the social housing register is now close a record high of 1.76 million, the time has come to think more radically about how the problem can be tackled on a wider scale. Councils, he writes, face two key problems, difficulty in sharing information and the perception thatsub-letting is not a serious offence. These lead intuitively to the need for unlawful sub-letting to be elevated to a criminal rather than civil offence. This would put the matter on the same legal footing as other types of benefits fraud and would give councils greater scope to recover more properties and reduce the amount of sub-letting in the first instance.

Mr. Symons says the national crackdown on tenancy fraud has been a step in the right direction but adds: “There is huge scope to adopt a more radical approach and start addressing, on a more fundamental level, the major barriers that are faced by local authorities when tackling unlawful sub-letting.”

The pilots, each of which will last for a year, will be run by the county councils in Essex and Northamptonshire, the London Borough of Newham and the local authorities in Herefordshire, Leicester, North Tyneside and Oldham. Each of the authorities will develop its own model for providing extra support. Jobs First will then evaluate the seven pilots and share the information with councils across the country to help them use existing resources more effectively.

Naming the pilot authorities the Care Services Minister, Phil Hope, said fewer than one in ten adults with learning disabilities who were known to councils in England were in paid employment. This meant many people were open to greater disadvantage and social exclusion. Having a job, he said, offered financial benefits and helped to give a sense of independence.

“I’ve met many people with learning disabilities who would love the chance to get a job but too often they find it incredibly hard to overcome the barriers they face. Personal budgets allow them to get the tailored job support they need,” he said.

The Minister added that the pilot schemes would show how this could be done and he was confident that the initiative would improve the effectiveness of support across the country. Jobs First will be closely aligned with the Right to Control initiative run by the Office for Disability Issues, which aims to give disabled people more power to decide how they live their lives.

It follows a paper in November last year which looked at the reliability of facts and figures used by councils, health trusts, social workers, doctors and police. Now, the Commission says, the focus of the debate has changed to focus on the quality, accessibility, volume and trustworthiness of information available to the public.

The new paper says the information that captures people’s imagination is the most likely to be used and simply depositing large volumes of data online is not enough to give people more choice or to improve decision making. It also highlights the increasing number of what it calls ‘infomediaries’ who present data in ways people like to use. It cites the international popularity of smartphone and computer applications on topics as diverse as your local MP, potholes, and checking up on blind dates.

The Chief Executive of the Audit Commission, Steve Bundred, said: “Making information available online can do more than help people make choices about using public services. It can enhance democracy by giving people more of a voice. If we know what decisions our councillors or MPs are facing, what they are spending taxes on, and what the results are, we can hold politicians and public servants to account, identify waste and even expose corruption,” Mr. Bundred said.

The Commission wants to stimulate debate on transparency in the public sector and is inviting online comments via thetruth@audit-commission.gov.uk

Ofsted inspectors looked at children and young people who needed particular support to promote their development and well being, such as those with speech and language difficulties or serious medical conditions who might need help from either health or children’s services. They found high-quality childcare was important for all children.

The best care was an important contribution to the lives of children in need as it identified their specific requirements and helped them to get the right support. The report also highlights how the best childcarers work closely with parents in new ways. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Christine Gilbert, said: “This report shows how the best childcarers are giving children in need a vital step-up in life and the best opportunities to learn and develop. It is important other childcarers learn from these examples of best practice.”

Welcoming the report, Andrew Fletcher, the Joint Chief Executive of NCMA, said it highlighted excellent work being done by dedicated childcare professionals. Many families with disabled children chose registered childminders because the home environment offered a greater degree of individual care and could complement care provided in partnership with other children’s services. He added: “I hope this important report will illustrate to local authorities the benefits of investing in specialist childminders and childminding networks to benefit disabled children and their families.”