A marriage made in heaven?

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Catherine Staite, Director of INLOGOV

The ESRC, LGA and SOLACE have created a new role – that of Research Facilitator for local government – with the aim of supporting strong and productive relationships between researchers, policy makers and practitioners. I’m very pleased to take on that role, with the active support of the INLOGOV team of academics and expert practitioners. Over the next year we’ll be establishing a dating agency for those seeking partners to answer some essential questions and running a series of events to support creative and sustainable relationships. A GSOH will be essential.

Public services need researchers. That is because evidence is the lifeblood of efficacy. When money is so tight, the last thing we should be wasting it on is the wrong service, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.  Policy decisions and service design need timely and accessible evidence and there’s plenty out there. So why aren’t researchers, policy makers, commissioners and providers using the available evidence to do better with less? Why aren’t we getting it together?

We work in very different spatial and temporal environments (note the unnecessary use of obscure language) which means that opportunities to meet suitable partners are limited and academic time-scales militate against speedy responses. Academic language is often impenetrable: designed to impress other academics rather than to inform those who can actually use the evidence on offer.  Contestation is a vital element of academic discourse. That means – academics also like to argue among themselves and even with themselves.  After a few pages of ‘on the one hand this and on the other hand that’  … policy makers and practitioners can be forgiven for giving up and going off to make it up.

However, the fault is not all on one side. Too often research is commissioned, not to gather objective evidence or stimulate creative thinking but to justify an existing policy or priority.  The findings of research can be a major challenge to political ideologies. Those who are seeking to bolster their prejudice with an academic fig leaf are doomed to disappointment.  If you ask for independent research – that’s just what you’ll get. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know the real answers. It will lead only to mutual disappointment.

So how can we make this relationship work? Let’s spend more quality time together, getting to know each other and exploring our shared passions.  Let’s make each other some promises.  If we promise not to argue about how many angels can dance on the point of a pin, would you promise not give us six weeks to enumerate and classify the angels and calculate the likely savings from combining seraphim and cherubim? Agreed? Great – now let’s do some good work together.

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.

Preparing future leaders: The Total Leadership Programme

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Daniel Goodwin – Senior Associate Fellow

The leadership and management challenges faced by local government have never been greater. Budget constraint, population change, and the need to respond to heightened expectations present future leaders with lots to grapple with. People thinking about taking up the top roles in public service will need a solid foundation of thinking and a great support network to turn challenge into opportunity.

The Total Leadership Programme is an exciting new venture which is designed to help senior local government managers prepare themselves for a chief executive role. It’s a partnership between INLOGOV and SOLACE (The Society of Local Government Chief Executives and Senior Managers), which fills a serious gap in provision nationally. It is open not only to directors in councils but also to people at a similar level within private sector firms who work in the public sector and who might be considering such a move too.

The programme will be delivered by a combination of INLOGOV Faculty members and Associates with significant management education development expertise, practicing chief executives and senior politicians, and experts in particular leadership fields.

Participants will develop a deeper understanding of the local government leadership space which will inform their future thinking in the remainder of the programme. They’ll consider how they will personally develop relationships of trust across the whole system locally and also how they might start to develop a national profile as an ambassador for place. The programme will help them feel at ease with ideas of complexity, collaboration, agency and leverage, and be able to use them to develop further learning.

Through an examination of local government in a non-UK context, participants will come away with reflections on the way local leadership happens in a different but comparable system. They will have thought about what we can learn about the way in which challenges are perceived and addressed. They will also have considered whether there are identifiably different strategies and approaches which might have an impact on their future work. In a module on entrepreneurial leadership, participants will gain a deeper appreciation of the perspectives of those they commission and explore what entrepreneurialism means in the local public sector context.

Finally, participants will consider how to create a positive public leadership narrative which helps them to engage with how people to see them as a leader. They will explore how to offer their leadership to people through a narrative that they can relate to. This will include exploring how engagement with digital media changes and shapes that approach.

All of the modules will be informed by the latest thinking on key cross-cutting issues, including community development and participative social media led democracy, demand management, ‘digital by design’ and new organisational forms.

Participants will have an input into the development of the modules through a design day in June and through ongoing discussions and reflection. They’ll also have access to INLOGOV’s distance learning materials and will be encouraged to engage in learning and networking between the modules. And of course they will also be able to learn hugely from each other, the groups will be kept at an optimal size of around 12-15 people to help develop a strong peer learning network.

The deadline for applications to the first cohort is 31st May and the modules start in September. Demand is high and the programme is already two thirds full. Confirmed participants include directors from a wide range of authority types from across the UK.

To find out more follow this link: www.solace.org.uk/tl

Know your local Councillor Photographs - St Albans - May 2008

Daniel Goodwin’s career has mainly been in local government, starting in libraries and cultural services and progressing through policy and corporate services. He is particularly interested in policy into practice issues, largely relating to local leadership and the politics of communities and place, and is a regular contributor to journals, conferences and seminars.

Make elections work for you: check the polls, but follow the money

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Chris Game

Spoiler alert: this is a blog about elections, but not local elections – mainly because it’s about election betting, and, with one conspicuous exception, which will be mentioned, our modern-day local election contests and candidates are rarely of sufficiently general interest to attract much serious fixed odds betting.

My prompt was the Conservatives’ recourse to their apparently hastily conceived Campaign Plan C – following the failures of A: negative, personal and increasingly counter-productive attacks on Ed Miliband; and B: daily, unexplained and increasingly implausible financial treats for everyone from NHS patients and rail users to volunteers and better-off housing association tenants.

Plan C involves drawing on – or alarmingly, in the latter case, ‘weaponising’ – the proven, if contrasting, electioneering skills of famous grey man, soapbox campaigner and former PM, John Major, and safe seat candidate and London Mayor, Boris Johnson.

Let’s start with Johnson, the opening paragraph’s ‘conspicuous exception’. You can currently get odds of 33/1 both on his being the next London mayor and next Deputy Prime Minister, and a very short 1/50 on his becoming MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip – which in itself gives a small hint of the huge growth in recent years of so-called novelty betting in general and political betting in particular.

We wagered over £1 million on Prince George’s arrival in 2013 and could well top that this time. Current shortest odds are on a blonde female, eventually named Alice, born on April 25, with 50/1 on triplets and 1000/1 on the hapless infant being named Boris. But royal births are peanuts compared to political betting. Bookies reckon we laid out £30 million on the 2010 election, £50 million on the Scottish independence referendum, and predict this election will be the first UK non-sports betting event to break £100 million.

With William Hill’s taking bets online of £200,000 and over the counter of £50,000 on a hung parliament – at 2/9 and 1/8 respectively – it suggests some clearly see it as an easy earner, and they could be right. The odds on these big bets may be short – £50,000 at 1/8 would win just £1 for every £8 staked, or £6,250 plus the returned stake. But that doesn’t necessarily make them unattractive compared, say, to the 8/1 (£8 for £1 staked) you could get on an improbable coalition involving the Scottish Nationalists.

The attractiveness of particularly these short odds bets obviously depends on whether you think the bookies can predict the results of election races as skilfully as they can horse races and football matches. Put another way, and the main topic of this blog: who are generally more reliable – pollsters or punters?

Step up, John Major, the country’s most electorally successful living Conservative, thanks to his historic triumph in the 1992 General Election. Averaged out, the then four main final polls put Labour ahead on 39%, the Conservatives on 38%, and projected a comprehensively hung parliament. Next day, Labour managed just 35%, while the Conservatives won nearly 43% and a Commons majority of 21 seats. Major became the only UK party leader ever to win 14 million votes – nearly a third more than Cameron in 2010 – a hung parliament was postponed for another 18 years, and ‘shy Tories’ had arrived as a pollster’s nightmare. For a young and still mistrusted polling industry it was a humiliating setback.

It has, as the current campaign daily demonstrates, recovered, grown, and evolved methodologically almost beyond recognition. At the same time, particularly with the proliferation of smaller parties, both polling and seat prediction have become considerably more hazardous. All political pollsters, however, are parts of large commercial companies. Screw up, and their other clients immediately know, so generally they’re highly rigorous and pretty good – provided you judge them reasonably.

They’re not predictors or forecasters. They take time-specific opinion snapshots, with different interrogatory cameras – some using online panels, some random digit phone dialling – of what they hope are politically as well as demographically representative samples of the whole electorate. But because they’re samples, mostly of between 1,000 and 2,000, not much more than 19 times in 20 will any single response be within 3 per cent (plus or minus) of what it would be, had the whole population been surveyed.

This means two things: first, roughly every 20th finding or poll will be outside that +/- 3 per cent margin of error; second, that ‘rogue poll’ will invariably attract more media attention than the rest put together.

That’s almost certainly what happened in the last fortnight of the Scottish referendum campaign. Of nearly 40 polls published between June and the September 18 polling day, only two put the Yes vote ahead. The coverage given to particularly the first of these polls was enough, though, to prompt all three major party leaders to panic in concert, rush up to Scotland, and make desperate vows and commitments they’re still regretting.

It doesn’t, though, explain why the averaged five final polls put the No vote on 49.2%, with a lead of just 4.2% – when the actual result was 55.3% to 44.7%, and a No lead of 10.6%. Poor methodology, very late change, shy No voters, whatever – the pollsters got it wrong.

And they got it as badly wrong – or, in fairness, their Israeli counterparts did – in this year’s perhaps most publicised elections: those in March to the Israeli Knesset, called early by Prime Minister and Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.  The averaged seat projections of the final seven polls published before Israel’s five-day pre-election poll ban gave Likud 22 seats and its main opposition, Isaac Herzog’s two-party Zionist Union 26 – prompting newspaper headlines like the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Bye-bye for Bibi?’.

The three exit polls suggested that the four-point gap had been closed in the final few days’ campaigning, but none came anywhere near the actual result of a six-seat lead (30-24) to Likud/Netanyahu. In what is a 120-seat legislature, with 10 parties having at least five seats, forming a government is tricky, but, in these matters anyway, Israelis are more patient than we are, and the permitted 42 days have been extended to allow Netanyahu until May 6 to name his.

Those ‘Bye Bye, Bibi’ headlines, however, weren’t the only ones. Gambling sites and the more refined ‘prediction markets’ were giving Netanyahu “an 81% chance of being re-elected”, and offering the equivalent of fractional odds of 1/6 on his winning and 4/1on losing.

It could have been a replay of the Scottish referendum. Over that final ten days, while English politicians and pollsters were over-reacting, the betting odds, overwhelmingly predicting No throughout the campaign, hardly wobbled: around 7/2 against Yes, and 1/4 for No. Indeed, one firm paid out a six-figure sum on a No bet three days before polling day.

These cases of the betting industry having a better sense (no apologies; pun deliberate!) of what’s actually happening aren’t the exceptions that prove the rule; they are the rule – a rule, moreover, that’s logically to be expected. Pollsters ask about our voting intentions and opinions, whereas bookies and bettors focus only on results and outcomes. Above all, though, they back their judgement with their money. So watch the polls carefully, as the bookies do, but if in doubt, then, as Americans might say, follow the frogskins (greenbacks for the alliteratively inclined).

At the time of writing – Wednesday 22nd – there have been 11 new polls since last Thursday’s BBC1Opposition Leaders’ debate. Five put the Conservatives ahead in percentage votes, five Labour, and one had them tied on 34 per cent.  There have also been seven poll-based seat forecasts: five showing the Conservatives ahead, two Labour.

No division among the bookies, though. The best seat-number odds being offered on Labour by any of Oddschecker’s 24 bookmakers were 21/10, while the best on the Conservatives were 1/2. Next PM, though, is very different: Miliband was 3/4 and shortening; Cameron 11/8 and drifting – rather like his party’s campaign.

Chris Game - pic

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

An invitation to the 7th annual postgraduate colloquium

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The School of Government and Society plays host to the 7th Annual Postgraduate Colloquium, being held in room 429 of Muirhead Tower on Wednesday 29th April between 9am-4pm. This event provides postgraduate researchers from across several departments the opportunity to showcase their research and present their latest findings.

Readers of this blog are invited to attend, especially those currently undertaking post-graduate research or who are thinking of doing so in the future, whether at Birmingham or elsewhere.

We have a full day of panels lined up with papers from PhD researchers from across the School, more details of which can be found on the website:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/government-society/events/2015/04-29-annual-postgraduate-colloquium.aspx

A free lunch will be provided on the day and a drinks reception will follow for all colloquium delegates and presenters from 5.30 onward.

Please confirm your attendance on our Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/350231068509806/

We look forward to seeing you all there and if you have any questions in the mean time please get in contact with Max Lempriere at [email protected]

Council Tax Support – anatomy of a Pickles’ localism triumph

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Chris Game

Shortly before the dissolution of Parliament, Communities & Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles issued an apparently self-penned eulogy of his ministerial record, entitled on the Government’s own website, in characteristic, cod Churchillian, style: Local Government: Delivering for England. It makes an interesting document, as would be hoped of one requiring two separate links.

First, I want to emphasise that it’s a genuinely useful exercise. It’s already easier than probably ever before to find out what the government thinks its policy is, at any particular time, both generally and by department and topic. Currently it has 224 of them. The DCLG has 24, including four each on local government and housing, and a rather extraordinary 215 “contain ‘local self-government’”.  There’s at least a Masters dissertation, surely: which nine Coalition policies failed to tick the ‘local self-government’ box?

Pickles’ eulogy, though, is quite different: a consummate politician’s listing of 60+ bullet-pointed triumphs and achievements, the like of which I at least can’t recall having for any previous administration.  The gov.uk version even gives us a proxy measure of the difference – in the dozens of instances of ‘[political content removed]’. And there’s another dissertation: the insight provided by the redacted and unredacted versions into civil service interpretation of ‘political content’ in the run-up to a General Election.

None of this, however, provides more than the opening key to the main subject of this blog. Somewhere between Pickles’ 50th and 60th bullet points – shortly before “supporting the Royal Wedding, Diamond Jubilee and VE Day by cutting Whitehall and municipal red tape on holding street parties, and introducing new laws to cut ‘elf and safety’ red tape on community events” – was “localising Council Tax Support (CTS), so councils are rewarded for getting people off the dole and welfare dependency and back into work, £1 billion has been cut from previous Council Tax Benefit (CTB) funding, and councils themselves bear the responsibility of increasing the living costs of some of their poorest residents.”

OK, I’d better come clean.  The ‘elf and safety’ bit is totally genuine – straight from the Pickles jar, as it were – but I’m afraid the last couple of clauses, after ‘back into work’, are mine, though, I would claim, entirely accurate and in a way slightly admiring.

For the CTB changes were Pickles’ self-styled muscular localism at its most politically skilful – a devolution of an important responsibility, impossible for councils to refuse, yet accompanied by conditions and constraints that meant any flak would go to them and any credit to the Conservative part of the Coalition.

The publication in the middle of the election campaign of the New Policy Institute’s third annual CTS monitoring report provides a timely opportunity to review one of the Coalition’s key and most controversial social policies, whose approaching launch was covered at the time in these columns.

The essence of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act was to replace, from April 2013, the means-tested Council Tax Benefit, paid for by the Department for Work and Pensions but administered to nearly 6 million recipients by local authorities, by Council Tax Support schemes individually determined and operated by the authorities themselves, and funded through business rates retention. It sounded like a laudable transfer of responsibilities from Whitehall to town hall – until you came to the attached strings.

First, with the professed aim of strengthening councils’ incentives to get people back into work, the amount the Government would pay local authorities for their new schemes would be 10% less than for CTB – creating for my own authority of Birmingham, for example, a funding gap of nearly £11 million.

Second, it ruled that pensioners receiving CTB must, and other particularly vulnerable groups should, be protected against any reduction in support – meaning in Birmingham that 54,000 pensioners were protected, while 83,000 working-age recipients were left shouldering potentially the whole savings burden.

It was only here, then, that the localism bit actually kicked in, with councils having the discretion, within a very tight deadline, to devise their own schemes to achieve these savings – and collect the taxes from their tens of thousands of new and aggrieved taxpayers.

In practice, this discretion amounted to three unenviable choices: spreading the cut in funding equally across virtually all CTB recipients apart from pensioners; giving the rebate to certain groups only; or continuing with the full rebate, and filling the gap either through raising council tax or finding savings elsewhere, on top of the savings already being demanded by the Government.

It would have been odd for a policy wholly designed to produce local difference not to do so, and there was and continues to be significant variation, in the metropolitan West Midlands as across the country. The practices adopted by the seven West Midlands metropolitan boroughs, though not statistically reflective of the national picture, can usefully illustrate it.

Game 9th April blog table

At that first time of asking in 2013, nearly 18% of the 326 English councils decided to continue with the same CTB-level rebate and somehow find the money, including four of the West Midlands seven.

70% of councils nationally and in the West Mids Birmingham and Wolverhampton – the two with the largest affected caseloads – introduced ‘minimum payment’ schemes, requiring everyone to pay at least some council tax, regardless of income. In Birmingham, therefore, it meant that almost all working-age people paid at least 20% of their council tax, representing an average annual payment of £147 or just under an extra £3 per week.

The remaining authorities, including Sandwell in our table, rejected ‘minimum payment’ but introduced other changes. Sandwell’s adjustments over the three years have included changing the income taper – the amount by which support is withdrawn as income increases; lowering the maximum savings limit over which one is no longer eligible for benefit; and reducing the second adult rebate – the benefit homeowners not on a low income receive if they share their home with someone (non-partner) on low income.

The main trends identified by the New Policy Institute over the now three years of CTS’ operation are the drop by nearly a third in the number of authorities still retaining all features of CTB, and the increase in percentage minimum payments – both seen in the West Midlands table. Nationally, 2.3 million low income families will pay on average £167 more in council tax in 2015/16 than they did under CTB, and 11% of those 2.3 million have also been affected by the ‘Bedroom Tax’ or ‘removal of the spare room subsidy’.

As for local councils, as is usually the case, they’ve generally coped – possibly too effectively for their own good. Some council tax collection rates have fallen fractionally, but nowhere (to my knowledge) as drastically as some predicted at the time. New council schemes to reduce worklessness are springing up all the time, but it’s difficult to identify which, if any, of these is incentivised by the CTB changes.

Something, though, is quantifiable.  Roughly £1 billion has been transferred from central government’s welfare bill to the shoulders of local government – and is being borne variously by increased bills for council tax support claimants, reductions in the claimant count, increased council tax bills for all, and reductions in other council budgets.  But then that’s muscular localism for you.

Chris Game - pic

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

An earlier version of the blog was published by The Chamberlain Files.

Queen Cersei and the evaporating Revenue Support Grant

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Chris Game

Next week is the last week of Hilary Term, or revision week at the end of Spring Term, as it’s known here at the UoB and most other universities who feel no great affinity to the probably inappropriately named 4th Century St Hilarius of Poitiers. Over the many years in which I lectured undergraduates, I used rather to like it: end of the course/module in sight, legitimate chance to share and spread gossip about approaching local elections, lecture attendances boosted by students desperate for exam hints. Plus, nowadays, plenty of discussion-prompting visual aids – one of which is the pretext for this blog.

SIGOMA is not – disappointingly perhaps – an African hip-hop band, but less catchily the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities (outside London) within the Local Government Association. Yes, even the brackets are part of the full name – which has to convey that its 45-council membership comprises most major urban authorities in the North, some in the Midlands, plus the ‘South Coast regions’ of Plymouth and Portsmouth. The 45, claim SIGOMA, share similar characteristics and can therefore advantageously speak with a collective voice – moreover, with one that, particularly following the Coalition’s changes to the local government funding system, needs to be distinctive from that of the LGA with its responsibility for somehow representing the interests of all its 400+ member authorities.

These funding changes, argues SIGOMA, are so divisive, and their impacts so damaging to areas with characteristics like those of its members, that they threaten to set region against region in the manner of – well, Game of Thrones.  As even non-followers of the popular TV series may be aware, the US fantasy drama chronicles the violent dynastic struggles for control of the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. SIGOMA’s spoof YouTube video is Game of Cuts – Winter is Coming for Councils – and, at under 2½ minutes to Game of Thrones’ soon-to-be-five seasons, it’s inevitably (even) less subtle.

The Sean Bean character, Lord ‘Ned’ Starp, Warden of the North (possibly Steve Houghton, Leader of Barnsley MBC, SIGOMA’s administrative base?) and his mate from the Coastal Ports, protest that “our people are already on their knees … the sick have no one to care for them, and our children nowhere to read …”, while the spokesperson for “the hamlets of Bucks and Berks” remonstrates that they too are suffering, with “not enough funding to keep our tables supplied with swan and game”.  But sadistic Queen Cersei of the South and her incest-conceived son, King Joffrey, are unmoved: “All the regions have had to make their sacrifices. The money has been spread evenly and you will cope, for the sake of the Seven Kingdoms”.

Doubtless, Local Government Minister Kris Hopkins’ family arrangements are altogether more conventional, but his presentation of the 2015-16 finance settlement last December suggests similarly briefed scriptwriters:

“The local government settlement is fair to all parts of the country – north and south, rural and urban, city and shire – therefore every council should be able to deliver sensible savings while protecting frontline services for local taxpayers … Those facing the highest demand for services continue to receive substantially more funding. For example, Middlesbrough has a spending power per household of £2,441 which is £871 more than the £1,570 per household in Windsor and Maidenhead.”

As noted in my recent blog assessing that settlement this has been the standard – and increasingly disingenuous – government line for the past five years. That blog, though, was largely about ministers’ ploy – what one might call the ‘spending power sleight of hand’ – to mislead the media and public from the outset about the true severity of their cuts to the funding of the local government sector as a whole.  SIGOMA’s current campaign – Protecting Vital Services – is about the discriminatory distribution of the cuts within the sector, and particularly the impact of the funding changes since 2013-14, which cumulatively have switched the determination of government funding from assessed needs formulae to councils’ tax-raising capacity.

The big change was the introduction of the Business Rates Reduction Scheme (BRRS). It was cautiously welcomed by local government for its devolutionary principle, but SIGOMA-profile authorities were immediately concerned that, as BRRS funding increased and Revenue Support Grant (RSG) correspondingly decreased, the big gainers would inevitably be already prosperous authorities with higher rate-raising capacities, and the gap between them and the less well-off with the highest demand for services would continue to grow.

The New Homes Bonus Scheme (NHB) story was not dissimilar. It was launched in 2011-12 to incentivise local authorities to grant planning permissions for new homes and bring empty properties back into use. For each additional home they would receive for six years an annual bonus payment equal to the council tax generated – from the government’s own funding. Again, it was cautiously welcomed, although it was obvious that authorities with higher banded housing would be the bigger beneficiaries. But no sooner was it established than the government funding bit switched to a top-slicing of RSG, and again poorer authorities have been absolute, rather than just relative, losers.

The Council Tax Freeze Grant was slightly different, in being from the beginning a disadvantageous bribe to councils to cut their spending, but its relevance in this context is that it too is top-sliced from RSG. Put just these three policies together over the three most recent finance settlements, and RSG – the principal source of central government funding of non-schools revenue expenditure and traditionally the mechanism for recognizing councils’ differing resource needs – has shrunk as a proportion of local government funding by over 5% a year.

Chart Game blog

SIGOMA calculates that over just these three years authorities with higher grant dependency and greater formula share in RSG have lost proportionately twice as much (around 20%) as those with more buoyant rates bases and greater protection within RSG (around 10%).

Incidentally, further confirmations of deprived areas suffering most harshly from the government’s cuts have been produced over the past few weeks alone in an Institute for Fiscal Studies Briefing Note, by the Association of North East Councils, and, most tellingly, in evidence from the DCLG itself in the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities (paras 8ff.).

Game of Cuts doesn’t go into the intricacies of RSG that SIGOMA’s Protecting Vital Services study does, confining itself to the billboard-style message that “Since 2010 local government in England has lost more than 40% of its core funding. Urban authorities, largely in the North and the Midlands, have lost the most money as a result of these cuts.” You don’t get SIGOMA’s proposed ‘fair and sustainable’ three-block future funding model either, but both productions, in their very contrasting ways, are worth a look – even if you don’t have a bunch of students to entertain.

Chris Game - pic

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.