visit by S of S

Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles is visiting Great Yarmouth today and local MP Brandon Lewis. During his visit he'll be meeting with the Leader of Gt Yarmouth BC and amongst the topics for discussion will be the current discussions to explore a three way joint shared management structure. The Leaders of Breckland and South Holland have been invited for this. I suspect the S of S will be encouraged by such innovative thinking towards modernising local government in order to respond to the needs of the present times.

Articles on Sharing

The latest SOLACE Foundation Imprint has been published. The topic is shared services / management. You can download a copy here.

SOLACE communique

here's a link to the SOLACE communique produced at the summit. download here

Solace TV interview

SOLACE webtv from the recent SOLACE Summit

Civic Crowd - have your say

I've just added a link to South Holland's Civic Crowd site. This has been designed by Dave Briggs to encourage views and ideas to elected members on how they use their ward budgets.

Shared Chief Executives

Here's a link to an article by Mike Bennett On his new blog publicinteligence. See it here

Localism and the National Planning Policy Framework

The Government is making some significant changes to the planning system that will affect the responsibilities of all local planning authorities. The intention is to make the planning system one that better supports sustainable economic growth and jobs, underpinned with the principles of localism, with less ‘top-down’ prescription and more ‘bottom up’ involvement.

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) will set out the Government’s priorities for planning in England. It will replace the current raft of planning policy guidance notes and statements with one document of less than 60 pages. The final version will be published around the end of 2011 or early 2012.

SOLACE in partnership with the LGG and PAS have recently published a brief overview the changes and their implications to which I've contributed the foreword.

You can read and download the document here Localism and NPPF