The campaign is over the votes have been cast and Conservative Party members have elected a new leader, in Liz Truss, who is also now the UK Prime Minister. The first 100 days for any new leader often set the tone for the remainder of their term of office. With multiple crises requiring urgent action in advance of winter, it will be telling for the longer term to see if local government features as a trusted vehicle to help develop and deliver effective policy solutions in the coming months.

With issues such as cost of living, the impact of inflation, climate, housing and social care at the forefront of peoples minds it would appear to be incoherent to think that significant progress can be made without the full engagement and deployment of local councils in tackling these.

Yet we know that the last decade has seen severe budget cuts and under investment in councils to the point where they are having huge difficulty in sustaining existing day-to-day services. Add to that major supply and service cost inflation and the scope for additional action becomes extremely limited.

As the runners and riders are whittled down in the Conservative Party leadership race, which will ultimately decide the next Prime Minister, it is timely to look at what issues impacting on local government will be waiting in the in-tray for the successful candidate.

Most immediate will be stabilising inflation to a more sustainable level, in order to begin to address the escalating cost of living crisis facing the country. Whilst some candidates will play to the core electorate in this race, promising tax cuts and low spend, it is inconceivable that more money will not be found to support the growing number of people who will be living in fuel and food poverty through the coming winter. Local government is uniquely placed to ensure that any money spent is targeted in the right places, at the right time, to the correct people to avoid families making choices between heating or eating.

With the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us it is now time to refocus on addressing the longer-term policy imperative of addressing climate change.

Whichever way you look at this issue the scale of transition is enormous; this will require different spheres of governance in the UK to not only recognise the legitimacy of each other’s role, in pursuit of the drive to net zero, but also to work closely together in cooperation and collaboration.

One area where this approach is needed more than ever is in master planning the transformation of local place in terms of sustainable transport, energy systems, developing new build homes and retrofitting existing properties.

APSE’s new research with the Town and Country Planning Association – ‘Rising to the climate challenge: The role of housing and planning within councils’, makes important recommendations as to how the system could be better aligned to boost the progress many councils are making in pursuit of their own declarations of intent on tackling climate change. It also identifies a number of system blockages that hinder current action.

The Prime Minister has made great play in recent weeks of the need to create a more secure supply of energy for the UK, as a result of the war in the Ukraine. Yet perhaps our focus should also be on reducing the amount of fossil-based energy we use in the first place, or at the very least, using decarbonised forms of fuel.

Emerging slowly from the pandemic to be met with a cost-of-living crisis has hardly brought great cheer to the public. Next winter is likely to be severely challenging for the most vulnerable in our local communities. The energy bill rebate, as it stands, is unlikely to make a significant impact and those forced to make a choice between, heating and eating, will likely look to their council for further support.

Thinking longer term, many councils have made their own declarations on achieving net zero in their areas and set off with action plans aimed at achieving this goal. Domestic heating is a major part of a council’s own footprint, as well as that of the wider area, and councils need to provide leadership in decarbonisation, not only through their direct actions on their own assets, but also through their stewardship of the wider area. With an estimated 19m houses requiring retrofit between now and 2050, and the average price tag for retrofitting coming in at £18,000, this will not be cheap.

Across the political and media landscape, there is no shortage of reference to the potential for a ‘Roaring Twenties’ style recovery as we finally emerge from the majority of restrictions associated with Covid, which have been in place for the majority of the past two years. However, will local government be dancing and singing or is it another false dawn in terms of the prospect of better times ahead?

Whilst the 1920’s have been long considered as a decade of progress, following a global pandemic, which brought trauma to society, it is important to also acknowledge that the 1920s were anything but roaring for many in the UK, instead characterised by growing unemployment, stagnating wages and sluggish productivity.

In any attempts to draw parallels with the present it’s important to not get too carried away with a positive bias. History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. As with the 1920s, today’s economic and political landscape is strewn with messy public policy issues that could stifle any roar into a whimper.

Local government faces a triumvirate of hugely important announcements in the coming months which will have major ramifications for its role, responsibilities and resources in the short, mid and long term.

By the end of October, the Chancellor should have announced the findings of a three-year Comprehensive Spending Review, setting out the UK’s priorities for public spending. At present spending departments are submitting proposals to Treasury as to how they intend to tackle a raft of public policy conundrums as well as deliver public services over the period to meet need. Treasury’s role is to identify synergy across Government priorities to maximise the spending of limited resources.

Concern remains for local government over the potential focus on headline capturing capital announcements while the revenue that so many of the frontline services rely on continues to deteriorate. For councils, the pressure also continues to build on covid recovery, reshaping our high streets, digital transformation, the care economy and the housing crisis, to name just a few headaches.

The UK is facing some stark skills shortages, exacerbated by Brexit, and as a result of the pandemic, many of the foreign nationals we have relied upon over the past decades to fill important roles, that keep the economy moving, have returned home. We are struggling to replace them with homegrown labour that either doesn’t have the skills, or the interest, in some of the more mundane but very necessary jobs in a functioning society.

For local government this means that many of the services it provides are struggling to recruit and retain workers to provide care, feed people or ensure the cleanliness of facilities and areas. For these services they are in a real battle with supermarkets and retail distributors, who are prepared to pay more for often simpler job roles. This is an increasingly uphill struggle.

In construction and building maintenance it’s not only tradespeople where there are growing shortages but increasingly councils struggle to recruit architects, surveyors and planners. Local authorities are forced to pay hefty premiums to others to supply these services or to agencies.

From HGV drivers to social workers, we are facing up to the fact that there simply aren’t enough qualified people to go around. Combine this with some of the seismic challenges society faces in a covid recovery, particularly within the care economy and the need to crack on with climate change mitigation and adaptation, then it becomes clear that the only way forward as a nation is to once again ‘grow our own’, but this of course will require enormous investment through the right mechanisms.

David Attenborough’s brilliant book ‘A life on our planet’ is a striking ‘witness statement’ as he describes it, to the impact of climate change on the world, but what it also provides, is some answers. Many of which we could action at a local council level. The rewilding of land to reinstate the natural order of nature, between predatory species and food-chains, the necessity of diverse plant species and tree preservation, in mitigating soil erosion and supporting carbon capture. These steps are not just about the Amazon rainforests, as essential as they are, but how we manage and value our local public realm and urban green space. 

Whilst many councils have declared a climate emergency a great many have also declared a climate and ecological emergency; reflecting that responses should not just be about EV charging points or solar panels, but about the preservation, and in many cases reinstatement of land.