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Jan 17, 2025 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
DEVOLUTION The makings of a fascinating year Abdool Kara looks to the year ahead as 2024 closed with a flurry of government actions for the sector. By By Abdool Kara | 17 January 2025 SHARE Well, this is fun, isn't it? As 2024 drew to a close we had the early Christmas presents of a Devolution White Paper and the draft sector settlement.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
FUNDING A lot more to come from the NAO in 2025 Abdool Kara says the National Audit Office continued to perform its public duty of supporting accountability to Parliament in 2024, 'with seminal studies on homelessness, special educational needs and disabilities and progress on remediating dangerous cladding'. By Abdool Kara | 11 December 2024 SHARE As we approach the end of the year, it feels appropriate to reflect on the events of the last 12 months.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
DEVOLUTION Who would bet against the number of councils dropping further? Unless there is unexpected largesse in the chancellor’s autumn statement, who will bet against the number of councils dropping further within the term of this Parliament, asks Abdool Kara. By Abdool Kara | 24 October 2024 SHARE I recently spent a half day with chief executives from a two-tier county area, who were contemplating what a new Government might bring.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | William Eichler |Javeed Khan |Abdool Kara |Martin Ford
SOCIAL CARE CIPFA criticises Scottish Government's social care focus The Scottish Government should focus more on tackling the ‘ineffective’ funding of social care rather than adding ‘bureaucratic layers’ to the system, public finance experts have said.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
PREVENTION Integrated Care Systems should be a Petri dish of preventative experimentation Of course, we need to prevent accidents and injuries, writes Abdool Kara, 'but might there be a return in shifting the focus, even if only a little, towards a wider workforce health and prevention agenda?' By By Abdool Kara | 17 September 2024 SHARE As I write, we have a new Parliament in place, a new Government starting to govern, and a new policy agenda emerging.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | James Stevens |Ann McGauran |Rebecca Lines |Abdool Kara
The new Government has recognised that it needs to increase housebuilding not only to alleviate England's housing crisis but also to generate revenues quickly to pay for public services. The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, wants to ‘kickstart' the economy, ‘unleash' home building and ‘power local growth', To get there the Government has announced a series of planning reforms to try and remove some of the barriers to home building.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
HOMELESSNESS Squaring the housing need circle Councils not planning to meet today’s housing need, let alone that of generations to come, are not fulfilling one of the core roles of any government, says Abdool Kara By Abdool Kara | 23 August 2024 SHARE On 23 July the National Audit Office published our latest report on homelessness.It is not pretty reading.We are clear that, despite the 2017 Homelessness Reduction Act, homelessness numbers are at record levels and increasing, there is no...
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
By Abdool Kara | 30 April 2024 Sector commentators so regularly trot out the line ‘local government is the most efficient part of the public sector’, that it has become received wisdom. But I have never once seen any evidence to support this assertion – if anyone has, please send it on to me.
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Mar 6, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
By Abdool Kara | 06 March 2024 We often talk about the sector being in an age of austerity, which started with the then new chancellor’s June 2010 ‘emergency’ Budget. Such terminology evokes the idea such ‘ages’ have a beginning and an end, like the Roman Empire, or the Jurassic period. The problem is that there is no end in sight to austerity regardless of who wins the next election.
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Jan 8, 2024 | 
themj.co.uk | Abdool Kara
By Abdool Kara | 08 January 2024 A ‘watershed’ is an area of land that drains water into a larger water body, such as a lake or a river. Drainage often forks to send water to two or more different water bodies, hence the terminology of a ‘watershed’ moment. It is traditional in a January column to speculate on the year ahead – and for me, 2024 has the feeling of being a watershed year, on many fronts.
