local government

Local Government Reform Died. No One Signed the Order.

Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons to announce that a policy she introduced, then handed to a successor who expanded it, has now been paused by the government she still serves in, for reasons that amount to this: our lawyers are worried, and the new prime minister may want

housing

The Housing Ministry Nobody Elected You Into

A quarter to a third of everything central government spends in Britain never passes within touching distance of a ballot paper. That is not my number; it is Bristol University Press's, from a study of arm's-length bodies, and it means quangos now handle a bigger share

local government

Nobody Voted for the Algorithm Making the Cuts

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

housing

The Housing Failure With No One's Name On It

Ronesha's younger son needs a fridge for his medication. For seven weeks last year, in a bed and breakfast in England, he didn't have one. The stay itself was already unlawful — the law caps a family's time in a B&B at six

Conservative Party

The Man With Four Convictions Passed Only One Check

Crewkerne South is a seat that did not exist a year ago, and almost nobody outside the Yeovil constituency could have located it on a map until Tuesday. That was when the Conservative Party selected as its candidate a man who spent three years in prison for posting antisemitic material

devolution

Burnham Brought Home the Invoice, Not the Power

Central government in this country collects more than 90p of every pound raised in tax. The OECD average is 53p. Britain is not merely centralised, it is an outlier among outliers, the kind of number that should embarrass a Treasury official into silence at a dinner party and somehow never

local government

Fourteen Councils, One Desk, No Ballot

Sometime this month, letters will go out to council leaders in the fourteen remaining areas of England, the ones spared judgment in March, when Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hampshire learned that forty-three of their counties and districts would be dissolved into fifteen new unitary councils. Hundreds of councillors' seats