One of the banner ads The Chamberlain News has been running recently is for the Japanese airline, All Nippon Airways (ANA), inviting us all to ‘Let’s Do Japan’. As it happens, my local government colleagues and I at the University of Birmingham have been ‘doing Japan’ for several years, and two of our Japanese visitors last week included among their ‘etiquette gifts’ a set of – postage stamps produced to promote local government in, in this case, Hyogo, one of the 47 prefectures that are the equivalent of our counties.

The stamps are attractive and easy to admire, and we inevitably wondered out loud how much Birmingham – or even the West Midlands region, whose population is similar to Hyogo’s – might pay for a similar PO issue. Not out loud, I also wondered about mentioning that by odd coincidence some of our local authorities too would be launching their own stamps this very weekend. But, with these being not pretty promotional ones, but wartime-echoing food stamps, I decided against it. But I will do here.

So many welfare and tax changes are being introduced at the start of this financial year that, apart obviously from planning how to spend the 5% tax cut on our £150,000+ incomes, it’s hard for most of us to keep track of them all. Even excluding those scheduled for later in the year, like the total annual benefits cap and universal credit, there’s housing benefit and so-called bedroom under-occupancy, the 1% cap on increases to working-age benefits, the council tax support scheme, the transition from the disability living allowance to personal independence payments, and several others.

All these changes are controversial, which has meant that the abolition or localisation of much of the discretionary social fund (DSF) – an admittedly small part of the total welfare system, as well as its proverbial Cinderella – has received less, and less critical, attention than it should have done. However, in what, as Paul Dale recently reminded us, is the 9th most deprived local authority in the country - whatever provisions were made for the DSF’s replacement would be important and would need publicising. As it is, while the city council’s chosen solution will surely be debatable, the one thing it’s unlikely to lack is publicity.

The social fund was set up in the 1980s, to provide interest-free loans and grants through both a regulated scheme and a cash-limited discretionary scheme. There are four regulated fund payments: cold weather, winter fuel and funeral payments, and Sure Start maternity grants. These will continue, and the social fund itself, therefore, is not being abolished.