A West Country council is to continue to work with the IT services company CSL in spite of chaos caused to its benefits payments by the privatised IT operation.
League tables could be introduced across the criminal justice system after a critical National Audit Office study found up to £84m could be saved by eliminating waste and spreading good practice.
A High Court victory by homeless families who objected to being placed in seaside accommodation will add to the spiralling cost of homelessness in London, local authorities warned this week.
A rise of 7% has been forecast in council tax almost three times the rate of inflation in the next financial year, with householders facing an average £56 increase in their bills.
Directly elected mayors for major cities in England and Wales could be in place as early as spring 2001 as the government this week signalled it wanted to speed legislation through parliament.
The Treasury is to more than double the number of cross-government spending programmes but has played down claims that this is an assault on the financial independence of individual Whitehall...
The influential Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) at the Cabinet Office is to investigate which public services can be delivered electronically and to examine the respective roles of both the...
Housing maintenance was this week placed ahead of long-term management improvements when local authorities were given an extra £67m to spend on council house repairs next year.
Auditors this week demanded that European commissioners seize a 'historic opportunity' and overhaul working practices in the European Union to stop the annual haemorrhaging of millions of pounds.
A major boost to the Private Finance Initiative in housing came this week with the government's announcement of four PFI schemes, totalling £185m, for the refurbishment of council houses.
Housing could lose out to other local authority services once all council capital allocations are thrown into a single pot, according to an expert on housing finance.
A new standardised service for testing the satisfaction of tenants living in council and housing association properties was launched this week by the National Housing Federation.
Council leaders in Burnley are in urgent talks with the government over how to clear their housing debt ahead of the proposed transfer of the authority's entire stock to a housing association.
In another age, there were people known as Kremlinologists. These experts would be wheeled out on British television and radio to discuss the significance of every minor change in personnel made to...
The Department of Social Security has shied away from a complete overhaul of its computer system in the wake of a catalogue of IT disasters across central government in the past few months.
Local authorities may have to boost efforts to combat stress and bullying at work after two councils this week paid damages of more than £150,000 to ex-employees.
Social Security Secretary Alistair Darling did little this week to dampen speculation that housing benefit faces abolition in a bid to cut down on massive levels of fraud.
Housing associations and community groups were this week invited to copy a savings and loans scheme established in Cambridge to improve low-income tenants' access to affordable loans.
Rent reform should begin immediately, with a major increase in the subsidy paid to registered social landlords, ministers were told by the National Housing Federation this week.
