Greg Clark stood up in the Commons on 17 January 2011 and called it the biggest transfer of power to local communities in a generation. The Localism Bill, he said, would sweep away the regional quangos and hand planning back to the people who lived with the consequences of it.
Somewhere in one of the thirteen mayoral combined authorities that will shortly acquire this power, a planning committee is about to spend an evening doing what planning committees do: reading objections about drainage, parking and the loss of a hedge, weighing them against a housing target nobody in the room
Somewhere in the paperwork for the 13 mayors of England there is now a line that did not exist a fortnight ago: the power to overrule a local council and wave through a development of more than 150 homes, or 15,000 square metres of shops and offices, or anything
July is supposed to be the good month. Self-assessment taxpayers settle up by the 31st, HMRC banks the windfall, and for four weeks a year the public finances look almost respectable. This July, provisional ONS figures put self-assessment receipts at a record £17.1 billion, the highest July haul since
Liverpool City Council has worked out that deploying artificial intelligence across its children's social care service will save the authority roughly £150,000 by the end of the 2027-28 financial year. The council's overall budget gap for the same period is upwards of £29m. Put the
Here is the number nobody at Westminster wants to sit with for longer than a news cycle: £164,347. That is what Lord Sainsbury gave Andy Burnham in the four months before he became Prime Minister, and it is not, whatever the Labour press office would like you to hear,
Somewhere in Clacton-on-Sea this week, a Personal Independence Payment claimant either opened a brown envelope or didn't, because most people stop reading DWP letters until the money stops arriving. Nigel Farage's own constituency has one of the highest concentrations of PIP claimants in the country. His
Danny Kruger, Reform's work and pensions spokesman, went on BBC Breakfast this week to explain how his party would fund £50bn of welfare cuts, and somewhere in the answer he conceded that Brussels might retaliate by cutting off British pensioners in Spain and France. "I'd
In the small hours of 26 May 2014, before the last European election results had even been declared, Nigel Farage stood in front of a scrum of cameras and announced a political earthquake. The broadcasters were still totting up regional counts. The projections had UKIP somewhere between 27 and 28
The confirmation came the way these things usually come now: not from the despatch box, not in a written statement laid before the House, but to a broadsheet, then to the BBC, via "a well-placed military source" who will remain nameless for as long as it suits everyone
At Clacton Leisure Centre in the small hours of 14 August, the returning officer read out 22,239 votes for Nigel Farage and the room did not erupt. Farage was not there to hear it — he had told supporters beforehand that he would skip the stage line-up, the odd little
Nigel Farage won Clacton on Thursday with 63% of the vote and did not turn up to hear it declared. He was, his office said, unwilling to be "humiliated by nobodies" — a fair description, perhaps, of Count Binface, who came a distant second in a bin costume, but