Meg Hillier, chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), will be giving the keynote speech at Room151’s forthcoming FD’s Summit.
The summit, being held in September alongside Room151’s 10th annual Local Authority Treasurers Investment Forum, has a theme of financial resilience, fair funding and capital strategy.
Labour MP Hillier will talk on the topic of whether central government is listening to local government’s concerns about financial resilience.
In June, the PAC produced a report which raised doubts about the ability of central government to ensure that local authority funding is sustainable into the next spending review period.
Speaking at the time, Hillier said: “It is no secret that councils are under the cosh.
“The mystery is how central government expects their finances to improve when it has such an apparently shaky grasp of the issues.”
The PAC report followed a critical analysis in March by the National Audit Office which said that there is still a lack of coordinated monitoring of the impact of funding reductions from different government departments to local government.
It said: “The interdependent and connected nature of service delivery in local authorities is not reflected at the level of government departments.
“Individual government departments have an understanding of the service areas for which they are accountable, but not necessarily of the potential implications of pressures in other service areas locally.”
However, in May, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government permanent secretary Melanie Dawes denied that government had a shaky grip on the state of council finances.
She said: “We map distributions on a number of different criteria, and we will look at those authorities that are outliers on more than one criterion and that will generate a group of authorities, sometimes in similar circumstances, such as social care authorities.”
She continued by saying that she was not aware of other local authorities that the department believed to be in the same situation as Northamptonshire County Council.
The council sparked intense interest in the state of local government finance after issuing a section 114 notice stopping all extra spending in February, followed by a second in July.
Dawes was keynote speaker at last year’s FD Summit, where she trailed changes to the investment code released at the beginning of 2018, to encourage greater transparency involving local authority commercial investments.
Also at this year’s FD’s Summit, Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson will address delegates about the economic outlook and the implications for local government in a world where councils increasingly rely on commercial income.
A panel of senior local government figures will also discuss whether and how local government can avoid more section 114 notices
In a separate session, James Goudie QC, head of chambers at 11KBW, and nicknamed the “Godfather of local government”, will cover the legal implications of increased commercialisation.
More than 170 local authority senior finance officers have already signed up to attend LATIF 2018 and the FD’s Summit, which take place on 20 September 2018 at the London Stock Exchange.
Read more about the conference
Public sector delegates can register here. (subject to availability and terms)
