Briefings and responses

It is encouraging that the Chancellor has announced £1.3 billion of extra funding, through the local government finance settlement, for the next financial year. Together with council tax flexibilities and locally-retained business rates, this will provide a real-terms increase in total core spending power in 2025/26 of around 3.2 per cent.

Wednesday 16 October, 14:30-16:00

The Bill requires councils to produce improvement plans for some of their high streets at the same time as the tools available to them to make improvements continue to be blunted because of the continued erosion of planning controls.

The LGA is calling on DSIT to coordinate the multiple bodies involved in the Public Switch Telephone Network switchover (digital phone switchover). Coordination and accountability are vital to align communications messaging and ensure sectors and consumers, including the most vulnerable, are protected and prepared for the upgrade process.

National economic growth can only be achieved if every local economy is firing on all cylinders. Councils need the right powers and adequate long-term funding to play a lead role in unlocking the labour market, creating jobs, plugging skills gaps and delivering for all our communities.

A Private Members’ Bill to require providers of electronic communications networks to grant other such providers access to their apparatus where that is necessary to ensure a consistent network coverage.

A Westminster Hall Debate on the Implementation of the Shared Rural Network

Councils want to go further to tackle regional inequalities in broadband infrastructure and accelerate the roll out in hard-to-reach communities. Local authority digital champions act as a central point of contact, helping to extend gigabit-capable broadband across the country as quickly as possible. We are therefore calling on Government to fully fund a digital champion in every local authority.

Upgrading, replacing and reconnecting these telecare devices, just one element of the PSTN switchover, to the digital network will be extremely costly. GLA Economics estimates the upgrade costs to be £31 million for London boroughs and impacting over 63,000 users.

The regulation proposed in this Bill is aimed at ensuring platforms have systems and processes in place to deal with illegal and harmful content and their associated risk, particularly to children and young people.