On November 8th, 2011, we hit the “go live” button on www.room151.co.uk and our adventure in local government finance publishing was underway. With no editor, no journalists, no money and not exactly a carefully crafted idea of where the title would go or how, Room151 was born.
For the previous couple of years, we’d been running the Local Authority Treasurers Investment Forum (LATIF) and treasury delegates had commented repeatedly on the lack of relevant professional information at their disposal, beyond what they would ordinarily get from their networks and their service providers.
So in we stepped! And what a journey it’s been for us, and hopefully for you, our readers.
Let us spare you a lengthy trip down memory lane, but from a content perspective we’ve covered everything from LOBOs to the LGPS, and s114 notices to PWLB rate cuts. And rate rises. And rate cuts again. We’ve covered austerity and its impact on local government finance, and we covered the era of council commercialisation that resulted from the cut to revenue support grant.
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We covered the first municipal bonds of this generation of treasurers and watched investment portfolios evolve from a long list of high-street counterparties to a more sophisticated approach to money management. We’ve covered bail-outs, bail-in risks, retail bonds, Covid grants, the HRA buyout, spending reviews, settlements, budgets, council tax referendums, interest rate swaps, PAC reports, treasury select committees and Channel4 documentaries. And that hardly scratches the surface.
We’ve seen a tumultuous decade of extraordinary change on the national stage, through the prism of our much-loved patch, speaking to and about public servants whose financial acumen continues to make a difference to their communities and their organisations.
Many thanks to all the journalists, the bloggers, the finance officers and the sponsors who helped us build a decade’s worth of content and analysis.
Three thousand articles, a couple of million pageviews and numerous conferences later, and a business has built up around the Room151 brand. We can’t wait to get cracking on the next ten years and must take this opportunity to thank all of our clients, readers and conference delegates for their support.
January 2022 will see us move into our new offices in the City of London (drop in for a cuppa—we’re near the Gherkin), and make some very exciting announcements on both the publishing and the events fronts … watch this space! We continue to grow as a business and as a content provider in this fascinating and important sector, and I’d personally like to thank everyone who’s helped us along the way.
Thank you,
Peter Findlay, publisher, Room151.
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