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.
The Health and Social Care Committee’s report correctly recognises the crucial role that local government has to play in ensuring children receive the support they need during the initial formative stage of life.
The Bill requires councils to produce improvement plans for some of their high streets at the same time as the tools available to them to make improvements continue to be blunted because of the continued erosion of planning controls.
The consultation paper was issued before strict measures were implemented to address the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the financial environment for local government has changed so profoundly that we cannot overlook the issue.
The valuation of non-investment assets for financial reporting purposes has been a contributory factor to the current crisis in local audit and how the valuation of such assets is audited is an area that needs to be addressed if the crisis is to be solved. Clearly how the assets are valued in the first place is an important step in that and we are in broad agreement with the proposals in the consultation for most asset classes. However, the proposals for valuing networked assets (usually called “infrastructure assets” in local authorities) will cause significant problems and additional costs for councils and we suggest that an alternative and more practical approach should be taken to valuing them.
The majority of parents who home educate their children do a good job and work well with their local council to make sure that a good education is being provided. However, we are concerned that not all children are registered as home schooled, particularly where they have never joined the mainstream education system or they have moved to a new area.
Councils have a proud history of welcoming new arrivals so that they can build new lives in the UK and have huge range of expertise that has informed the development and delivery of that support.
In the longer term the LGA is calling for a shift towards investing in homelessness prevention measures. This includes maintaining increased support through the mainstream benefits system, increased protection for private renters, and a commitment across government to a programme of homelessness prevention.
Councils want to end homelessness and are already doing everything they can within existing resources to prevent and tackle it, but there is no silver bullet and councils alone cannot tackle rising homelessness.