Briefings and responses

The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill acts upon long running asks from councils and the LGA for further devolution in England. We are pleased that the Government has proposed to speed up the process and make good on its commitment to offer all of England the opportunity to benefit from a devolution deal by 2030.

It will be important that any new requirements or responsibilities for councils align with proposals being brought forward in both the Fire Safety Act and the Building Safety Act and are fully funded.

Everyone should have access to healthy and affordable food. The strategy response represents a missed opportunity to tackle the underlying causes of a variety of issues, many of which will continue to be exacerbated by the growing cost of living crisis. Unless the government takes urgent action, health inequalities will widen and its ambition to halve childhood obesity by 2030 will be missed.

This briefing summarises the housing and planning proposals of most relevance and significance to local government. It also provides the LGA’s initial reaction to the proposals along with our policy messages, which may necessarily evolve as discussions on the proposals continue.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, councils have been working closely with the Government to ensure support for new arrivals from Ukraine is put in place quickly and at scale, and families are kept safe.

The current issues with local audit are complex and have a number of causes including a limited number of firms within the market and a shortage of suitably qualified auditors working for those firms. This situation has been made worse by tighter and stricter regulation of auditors following audit scandals in the private sector and more recently by the difficulty of auditing under COVID restrictions.

Smoking prevalence analysis: methodology summary by the LGA Research and Information Team

The LGA has called on the Government to provide councils with the powers and tools to reverse the chronic shortage of social housing, including giving councils powers to build 100,000 high-quality, climate-friendly social homes a year.

Councils have a crucial role to play in education, from ensuring every child has a school place to turning around struggling schools, which they demonstrated when providing vital support to schools during the pandemic.

Councils want to work as partners with central government, and Ofgem, to tackle climate change with a focus on transitioning to net zero.