Briefings and responses

The Children’s Commissioner’s report highlights the complexity of issues facing young people and their families.

Councils are working hard to deliver the right kind of homes, and are currently approving nine out of ten planning permissions.

The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill will convert the entire body of EU law into UK law, with the intention of allowing businesses to continue operating and providing fairness to individuals, knowing the rules have not changed when the UK leaves the EU. This legal certainty must be given to councils too.

The LGA welcomed the appointment of a House of Lords Select Committee to investigate the effectiveness of the Licensing Act 2003 and the insight that the Committee’s work has provided in a number of areas.

Councils have regulatory responsibilities in relation to a broad range of products arriving in the country at ports of entry.

We welcome the references in the white paper to the importance of involving local government in the development of the UK’s trade policy.

The Autumn Budget has taken a step forward by lifting the housing borrowing cap for some councils. We welcome this announcement, but it does not go far enough.

The local government finance settlement is the annual determination of funding to local government from central government. This briefing covers the consultation on the local government finance settlement for 2018/19. We expect the final 2018/19 settlement to be laid before the House of Commons, for its approval, in February 2018.

The LGA welcomes the principle of greater flexibility for local areas to design multi-agency arrangements that work best for their local circumstances, but we have long argued that this flexibility must be couched within a robust regulatory framework to ensure consistency of quality and effectiveness. Unfortunately, we believe that the provisions outlined in the consultation fall some way short of this ambition

Complicated national criteria for competitive funds will waste resource and slow down the UK reaching compliance. The LGA also believes that there is more scope for the Government to take national steps to hasten the transition to low emission vehicles.