BUSINESS confidence has deteriorated despite export growth holding up, according to the latest ICAEW/Grant Thornton UK Business Confidence Monitor. Key findings from the survey, which covers activity …
A second Independent has entered the race to become the first West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner.
Cath Hannon, a former Detective Superintendent with the force, says she has a unique set of skills and abilities that are not available to any other candidate for the £100,000-a-year job.
On a launched this week, Ms Hannon says she will not
The hottest topic of conversation at this week’s Birmingham council cabinet meeting involved a relatively inconsequential decision, as is so often the case in politics.
Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors are in a tremendous strop over the Labour administration’s decision to force District Committees to meet in the Council House.
Doesn’t sound like the end of the world, does it?
A simple guide to the great devolution row: the council used to have ten Constituency Committees responsible for running a few local services like parks and libraries. They met in the constituencies, usually in the evening. No one much went and the committees achieved very little other than overspending their sizeable budgets.
Labour council leader Sir Albert Bore has replaced these bodies with
Birmingham’s cabinet member for Children and Family Services is on a potential collision course with Education Secretary Michael Gove after announcing that no city school will be forced against its wishes to become an academy.
Brigid Jones, who took on the high profile role when Labour regained control of the city council in May, has written to all Birmingham’s head teachers proposing that the local authority’s links with schools should be strengthened rather than weakened.
She is proposing setting up a co-operative trust to which “all schools can choose to belong”.
She makes it clear in her letter that the council will
The Conservative candidate for West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner is promising to introduce tough new powers for Police Community Support Officers.
Matt Bennett said he would make sure that PCSOs were given all of the powers available to them under national legislation including the right to detain suspects and issue fixed penalty fines.
Mr Bennett is critical of the local approach to PCSOs, which he said were not being well used.
Of 58 powers available to community support officers, the West Midlands force allows only
Thousands of businesses are being given the chance to have their say on the top priorities for the West Midland’s first Police and Crime Commissioner.
Chambers of commerce representing Birmingham, North Staffordshire and Coventry and Warwickshire are asking members what they would like to see from the £100,000-a-year official, who will be elected on November 15.
PCCs will replace police authorities and be responsible for drawing up five year crime-fighting plans.
Whoever gets the West Midlands job will have to identify major priorities for the force, hold the chief constable to account and consult regularly with local communities.
Henrietta Brealey, a spokeswoman for Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, said:
The Staffordshire MP who described the Olympics opening ceremony as “leftist multicultural crap” on Twitter has stood by his comments.
Today’s papers are stuffed full of Olympic reportage rather than analysis of the GDP figures. But down in the bowels of Whitehall, a list of policy options to try and boost economic growth are being drawn up. Decisions on what to do will be taken after the Olympics but that further planning reform is currently on the list.
The coalition announced a new national policy planning framework in the Spring. But it was not as radical as George Osborne and the Treasury wanted it to be: opposition from heritage groups like the National Trust and various environmental organisations led to it being watered down. With the economy shrinking and construction in particular decline, though, the Treasury wants to come back to this fight. I’m told ‘George has even less time now for all of the green groups’.
If Downing Street does come back for another bite at planning, it is sure to spark political controversy. The question is whether the continuing problems of the economy will enable them to win the argument that it needs to be made easier to build in this country.
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A team of international experts has been appointed to help Birmingham businesses become more innovative, vibrant and entrepreneurial.
The city council-led Smart City Commission will investigate ways of nurturing future economic growth.
International experts from Europe have offered their support as founder members of the city council-led body – including Enrique Sanchez from Madrid-based transport infrastructure firm Ferrovial and Guenter Pecht-Seibert, the German-based Senior Vice President of technology firm SAP AG.
A council spokesman insisted that
‘Osborne’s austerity is killing the recovery.’ It’s a familiar refrain, one that we hear every time there’s bad economic news. And, sure enough, today’s terrible GDP stats have sparked yet another rendition. Take , for example, from the TUC’s Brendan Barber: ‘The government’s austerity strategy is failing so spectacularly that is has wiped out the recovery completely.’ But very rarely is that austerity quantified. Just how big are these cuts that have supposedly crippled the British economy?
Well, according to the, total managed expenditure stayed roughly flat in the coalition’s first year, before being cut by just 1.8 per cent in real terms (£12.6 billion) in 2011-12. But this hides the true extent of the cuts to public services, as it includes the ever-rising benefits bill and our debt interest payments. Stripping these out leaves ’public service spending’ — which fell by 3.3 per cent in 2010-11 and a further 4.3 per cent in 2011-12, leaving it 7.3 per cent (£35.2 billion) below 2009-10 levels. But it’s worth remembering that even after those cuts, spending on public services is still higher — in real terms — than it was in 2007-08.
We can also separate this public service spending into current spending and investment. This reveals that the brunt of the cuts have occurred on the investment side, which is down 47.9 per cent (£24.4 billion) while current public service spending is down just 2.9 per cent (£11.5 billion).
P.S. These latest ONS figures show that last year’s cuts were larger than the OBR forecast in March’s Budget. It predicted cuts of 0.9 per cent in total spending and 2.9 per cent in public service spending in 2011-12, compared to the 1.8 per cent and 4.3 per cent shown here.
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