Briefings and responses

While the Government’s £1.57 billion support package for the arts and culture sector was welcome, the sector is still facing significant financial difficulties. Councils face significant additional cost pressures as a result of COVID-19 and this will directly impact council’s ability to fund discretionary services in the culture sector, at a time when the sector is in urgent need of investment.

The LGA supports the Government’s amendments to introduce a mandatory duty on certain professionals to report child sexual abuse (CSA) as part of a holistic approach to improving the response to CSA. While it is a positive step forward, the duty must not be considered a silver bullet nor introduced in isolation. It must be supported by wider national action to ensure all professionals are trained to identify abuse, support victims to disclose abuse and ensure they receive the best possible support when they do.

We do remain concerned by the increase in the charges councils are having to pay to the ICO as data controllers. This comes at a time when local government is under significant financial pressure and councils are receiving no additional government funding to help implement GDPR.

We welcome the decision to provide an exemption for elected representatives. We do however remain concerned by the increase in the charges councils are having to pay to the ICO as data controllers.

We are disappointed the Bill removes the existing requirement to designate a data protection officer. Although the proposal is now to replace this with a Senior Responsible Individual, this is a person at Senior Management Team level who would not have the time or experience to undertake much of what the data protection officer did.

Councils share the Government’s ambition of making sure every child with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) gets the high-quality support that they need. Reforms set out in the Children and Families Act 2014 failed to achieve the goal of improving provisions for children with special educational needs and disabilities and were not supported by sufficient powers or funding to allow councils to meet the needs of children with SEND or hold health and education partners to account for their contributions to local SEND systems.

There is consensus that a hotel is not the right place for children to be living. The LGA agrees with the Government in wanting the National Transfer Scheme (NTS) to work well in ensuring unaccompanied children.

This briefing outlines LGA policy on council tax and council tax reform and also highlights work commissioned by the LGA on council tax and alternative forms of funding for local government.

Councils are supporting children and young people with high quality mental health support. Children’s services see more than 500 cases a day of children presenting with a mental health problem.

The housing shortage is one of the most pressing issues we face. Councils have a key role in delivering more affordable housing and helping to build 300,000 homes a year. The last time this country built more than 250,000 homes a year, councils delivered more than 40 per cent of them