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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Throughout the pandemic, councils have provided a lifeline to struggling hospitality businesses by distributing more than £11 billion to 880,000 small businesses in 2020. As the government implements the road map to re-opening, councils will continue helping businesses to re-open safely.
We welcome the Government’s roadmap and evidenced-based approach to reopening, and on behalf of councils we are keen to work with national government and public health experts to ensure public gyms and leisure facilities can reopen safely and as soon as possible.
While these powers are a welcome addition to the tools that councils have to tackle local outbreaks, and some councils have issued directions, there are also some challenges in using the directions. The regulations include the threshold of a serious and imminent threat to public health before a direction can be issued, and there is a need to consult with both the local Director of Public Health and to inform the Secretary of State for Health. This threshold has had the effect of deterring councils in areas where there has not to date been a significant rise in infections from issuing directions, in the belief that they do not meet the test of a serious and imminent threat to public health.