Policy Statements and Initiatives
ScotGov: Scotland's housing system must adapt with 'radical thinking and bold new ideas' to the financial realities presented by reductions in public spending, according to a discussion document published by Scottish Ministers last week.
Housing: Fresh Thinking, New Ideas poses fundamental questions about the way homes can be built, allocated, funded & managed in the future and is linked to a new website where members of the public can contribute to the debate.
An examination of where the Scottish Government's housing priorities should lie is also proposed: increasing social housing, supporting aspiring homeowners and reducing carbon emissions. Ministers also unveiled a Scottish Government-funded pilot project, the first of its kind in the UK, which will analyse thermal imaging scans of 10,000 homes across Scotland. The results will help the drive to tackle fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions.
CLG: Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government, Eric Pickles, has announced that; ‘Wasteful & unnecessary restructuring plans for Exeter, Norwich & Suffolk Councils are to be stopped immediately’. This will ‘save the taxpayer £40m in restructuring costs, remove the risk of further pressure on local council tax bills, and avoid a costly distraction from the priority of delivering local services and genuine efficiency gains’.
The independent Boundary Committee recommended in December 2009 that the unitary plans for Exeter & Norwich should not be implemented. There were concerns about affordability, the risk of fragmenting local services, and the lack of widespread local support.
He has also called a halt to the consultation on proposed changes to Suffolk. Councils in Suffolk had been asked to establish a county constitutional convention to reach a consensus on a unitary structure for Suffolk. This will now be cancelled and all restructuring plans for Suffolk will be stopped.
DWP: A ‘radical’ welfare reform programme designed to tackle entrenched poverty and end the curse of intergenerational worklessness was set out last week by new Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith.
Calling for an end to a culture of welfare dependency by bringing the welfare system into the 21st century, Iain Duncan Smith set out the critical need to make work pay and end the absurd situation where some of the poorest face huge penalties for trying to get off benefits and into work.
Evidence of the scale of the challenge is set out in a report published last week by the Government - State of the Nation: Poverty, worklessness and welfare dependency in the UK – which highlights some of the key problems facing the country including:
* 1.4m people in the UK have been on an out-of-work benefit for 9 or more of the last 10 years
* Income inequality in the UK is now at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961
* A higher proportion of children grow up in workless households in the UK than in any other EU country
* Social mobility in Britain is worse than in the USA, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Canada & Denmark
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