General Reports and Other Publications
IISS: The latest Strategic Comment from the International Institute for Strategic Studies says that ‘Debate in the United States on ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has taken a step forward after a study concluded that international nuclear monitoring had advanced significantly in the past ten years’.
PC&PE: The Government must employ a basket of measures, covering all tenures of housing, if sufficient finance is ever to be available to tackle the country's housing crisis, says the Communities and Local Government (CLG) Committee in a report examining the financing of new housing supply.
The Committee calls on Ministers to set out proposals for the future delivery of affordable homes, and to consult on how housing associations should be financed in future. It also urges ministers to look to different models of delivery to help meet the housing shortfall. It sees interesting potential in self build and points to Almere in the Netherlands as a useful model.
ESRC: Schools, local councils and professionals need better guidance & training to work with migrant families from Eastern Europe & their children, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
ESRC: Understanding linguistic diversity among London's schoolchildren is key for the city’s future as a 'global player', research shows. A study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council mapped the distribution of languages spoken by London state school pupils. By combining language spoken with ethnicity, researchers have shed new light on patterns of educational inequality.
WAG: The Welsh Government has published new evidence on regional & local market pay that will be submitted to the Treasury and to the Pay Review Bodies. The evidence, by WAG’s Chief Economist, shows that the ‘arguments put forward by the UK Government are flawed and are far from the full picture’.
IPPR: Bradford is the most economically polarised place in England, with the biggest gap between its most & least deprived areas, according to a new report published by the think tank IPPR. The report says that without more local power over housing spending, including housing benefit, and action both to secure new investment and strike new ‘something for something’ deals with landlords, the gap between the housing ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ will persist.
Civitas: Britain's financial regulators have been co-opted into protecting major banks from competition, according to a new Civitas report. The result is that big banks can get away with reducing lending to businesses and offering poor service to customers, without the risk of losing accounts to competitors.
Street Cred, by Stephen L. Clarke, examines how financial regulations, introduced to protect consumers, have, ironically, been wielded to defend the market position of big commercial banks against new entrants, while examples of successful local banks in parts of Europe show how a rejuvenated local banking sector could more effectively serve British businesses and consumers.
LGA: According to the analysis from the Local Government Association a total of £2bn has been allocated by government to help rebuild between 100 & 300 of the country's crumbling schools under the Government's Priority Schools Building Programme, but not a penny of this has been spent because of missed deadlines and long delays.
UKOC: On 22 March 2012, UK online centres together with the LSE's Media Policy Project organised the first Social Digital Research symposium, bringing a number of different people with a stake in digital inclusion together around a table to discuss how we can better share our knowledge & findings. The symposium threw up a number of interesting questions & discussion topics, which you can now read in the full report.
NAO: The National Audit Office has published a report on the government fund to support private sector jobs and growth in places that rely on the public sector. The report concludes that applying tighter controls over the value for money offered by individual bids and then allocating funding across more bidding rounds could have created thousands more jobs from the same resources.
