Speaking at a recent European conference on remunicipalisation of public services set me thinking about the lifecycles of markets and how they can go full circle.

I was asked to give a presentation based on APSE’s research publications into why so many UK local authorities, of all political persuasions, are insourcing services on a significant scale. This has accelerated significantly over the past five years and the main factors cited are usually value for money, poor customer satisfaction levels and a failure to deliver on promises that contractors had made.

My recent article from Public Finance

The government has gone cool on green issues. Whitehall must do more to support council initiatives

The CBI, environmental campaigners and trade associations were united in criticising Chancellor George Osborne’s lack of support for green initiatives in his latest Budget.

The Association for Public Service Excellence has been one of the organisations arguing that investment in environmentally friendly infrastructure and technology will stimulate economic growth as well as curbing climate change.

The Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) is calling on central government to unlock local authorities’ potential to develop the green economy.

APSE’s rallying cry came as it launched a new report The transition to the green economy: the vital role of the ensuring council, which shows what local authorities are achieving and highlights ways in which national policy could be changed to enable them to do more.

I gave evidence in London today to Lord Whitty's inquiry on the affordable housing crisis.

My starting point was that to resolve this crisis local authorities need to play a key role again in providing a quality affordable housing option for all not just a safety net for some.

It's important to place where we have got too in a context, therefore I referred to the fact that the challenge for the new government of the day in 1997 was clearly about tackling the £22b backlog of repairs in council houses and bringing them up to the decent homes standard. However, the process which brought this about resulted in stock transfers, continuation of right to buy and demolitions.

With a huge amount of market volatility at present, is now really the right time for local government to be looking to the private sector for solutions?

The names Southern Cross, Connaught, ROK and Fountain have probably done more damage to the outsourcing agenda in local government than the collective writings of opponents of this approach since the dawning of Compulsory Competitive Tendering 30 years ago. Throw in recent headlines around A4e and you can see that for an industry that works so hard on its image, the last couple of years have not been a great time.

Copy of an article Neil McInroy from CLES and myself recently did for Public Finance magazine.

Councils should be leading the way with renewable energy schemes. They can reap important economic and social rewards as well as environmental benefits

A report published this week by the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) suggests there is still a business case for local government-led renewable energy schemes.

If local government thought 2011 was tough, 2012 may be about to get a whole lot tougher. With an estimated 145,000 job losses in councils over the previous 12 months, some may have thought the heavy lifting had been done. However, my fear is that whilst many have made significant progress in efficiency programmes, this may prove difficult to sustain – and the knock-on effect for councils that didn’t quite get there in year one could be catastrophic. With ongoing redundancies, wage freezes, rising pension payments and inflation remaining relatively high, morale will be near the floor.

APSE’s first strategic forum of the New Year took place last night on the theme of energy efficiency in asset management. Guest speaker was David Kilduff, Head of the Commercial Group at Walker Morris Solicitors, who gave an overview of the issues facing local government in this area.

These events are used as an opportunity to develop policy and share knowledge.