APSE's recent Housing and Building Maintenance seminar In Leeds gave me a chance to hear the views of colleagues working in this sector of local government and the issues that were vexing them, three main issues came to the fore.
This article is based on a recent column I did for the MJ magazine.
What will local government look like in 2020? My answer is that it will depend significantly on what elected members and officers want it to look like and the policy choices they make.
Whilst I accept that central government decisions will always have an impact in shaping local government, it is members and officers, in conjunction with the local public, who will decide what the political vision for an area is, what outcomes are pursued to achieve this and how this is implemented through the services the council is responsible for providing and delivering.
Someone who has influenced my thinking on local government greatly over the past couple of decades has this week published a new book, 'A Guide to Solar PV Projects - in Local Government and the Public Sector'. The first books of Stephen Cirell's that I read were thick local government law encyclopaedias around Compulsory Competitive Tendering, followed by similar tomes on Best Value, then the Private Finance Initiative and Charging and Trading. So how does someone go from this background into the arena of climate change, renewable energy and energy efficiency? And do they know anything about the topic?