On behalf of its membership, the cross-party LGA regularly submits to Government
consultations, briefs parliamentarians and responds to a wide range of parliamentary inquiries. Our recent
responses to government consultations and parliamentary briefings can be found here.
Evidence shows that every £1 invested in supported housing prevents over £3 in NHS and social care costs and can avoid up to £47,000 per person in some cases. These savings could be recycled to sustain the licensing regime and expand supply if councils were provided with long term sustainable funding to boost supply of supported housing through commissioning. Licensing would become less cumbersome if councils were able to rely more on commissioning and contract management to take a risk based approach.
Local authorities and the communities they represent are critical to the success of local and national inclusive growth, and the delivery of much-needed infrastructure.
Knife crime cannot be successfully tackled by dealing with supply of knives alone. Councils have shown that with adequate resources and strong relationships with partners, they can positively reduce knife crime through upstream intervention.
The complexity of local authority accounts has contributed significantly to problems with local audit. In addition, the reform of local audit will only be successful if financial reporting is simplified in order for the scale and size of audits to become more proportionate.
The areas identified in the consultation questions are mostly suggested minor improvements or clarifications. In our opinion, they do not warrant a full scale revision and re-issuing of either code. Instead, there are alternative ways of improving guidance and supporting good practice, such as by the provision of more training.
Whilst we welcome the Government’s recognition that it needs to work with councils to achieve nationally for local people and communities, the list of outcomes and outputs within the framework is ultimately a top-down approach. In future, in the spirit of partnership, we would like to see government working with the sector to identify and unblock barriers to the achievement of the outcomes; to resource councils to deliver those; and to review and refresh the outcomes in due course.
The Sentencing Bill enacts several of the recommendations of the Independent Sentencing Review (ISR) that require legislation. The Bill makes significant changes to the sentencing framework, the way in which offenders are managed and serve sentences in the community, and also aims to create a justice system that better serves victims.