New research has found big gaps in holiday childcare across the country, especially for children with disabilities. The survey by the Daycare Trust, is the first to be carried out since councils in England and Wales had to undertake Childcare Sufficiency Assessments.
The survey found that more than half of English local authorities reported parents felt there was not enough holiday childcare. All regions pointed to a lack of places for children over 12 and for disabled children. 

Councils are being given back their central role as housing providers in a series of measures to increase the number of available homes. As a first step four Local Housing Companies have been announced and will see local authorities working with the private sector.
The four Companies will be in Barking and Dagenham, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Manchester. 

Carbon emissions from schools will be included in a carbon trading scheme for local authorities from the Spring of 2010. The move means that energy use in schools buildings will be counted in councils’ total emissions under the mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment set up to encourage local authorities to reduce emissions.
Councils will now be expected to provide help and advice to schools cutting both their energy bills and their carbon footprints. 

More people in rural areas are living in poverty, according to the Commission for Rural Communities in its ‘State of the countryside 2008’ report, which is published today. The report, the tenth in a series giving a definitive picture of rural England, also points to concerns over the decline in services and the challenge of meeting the need for affordable homes. 

The Information Commissioner believes that there has not been enough parliamentary or public debate on proposals to collect more and more personal information. Richard Thomas also argued that any government run database holding the telephone and internet communications of the whole population would be a step too far. 

The numbers of people being admitted to hospital in England as a result of violence has risen by almost a third in four years, according to a study published online today ahead of appearing in print in the ‘Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health’. The study also found a big difference in rates of admissions between those living in the most affluent and most deprived areas of the country. 

New steps have been announced to try to increase the number of women, people with disabilities and those from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities who are selected for the boards of public bodies. Currently only a little more than a third of public appointees are women and the Government has set out its determination to increase that to at least 40 per cent in the next three years. 

Proposals for new planning rules from Communities and Local Government would give councils more scope to refuse out of town development proposals that threaten the survival of high streets and small shops.
The new proposals maintain the ‘town centres first’ policy, but impose a tougher ‘impact test’ to give councils a better tool to prevent big developments that put small shops and town centres at risk. 

Social entrepreneurs are more likely to come from under represented groups and it is these people that are likely to be innovative in tackling the needs they see in front of them on a daily basis. These findings come from a report based on a five-year survey of social entrepreneurship in the UK, published by the Social Enterprise Coalition.
The Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities are more likely to produce entrepreneurs than the White community. 

The contract between local politicians and the people they serve is to be rewritten to achieve a fundamental shift in power and to give local communities and citizens the ability to influence the issues important to them. The white paper, Communities in control, describes a range of measures designed to put more power in the hands of citizens and allow them to get involved in managing and shaping local services.