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Commercialisation strategy 1.0 was very much about trading and charging, using some surplus capacity or getting additional benefits from assets during the 1980’s. Fast forward to today and version 10.0.3 of that strategy is hugely different in scope and range.

Of course local authorities have suffered heavily as a result of austerity and still face further huge financial challenges, not least an intention by Government to almost completely remove RSG by 2020, however impractical and unfeasible this may appear for many areas of the country.

There are some who criticise local government as being bureaucratic and lacking in creativity. In reality, local councils are being highly innovative in plugging the income gaps left by ongoing austerity and there is something of a renaissance in municipal investments.

APSE and CIPFA property services set out to identity the scale, scope and advantages of municipal investments and the results of our research have found councils taking a measured approach to investments designed to balance risk and rewards. In many ways asset investments allow councils to convert capital investment into revenue - helping them to sustain local services.

With the spending review completed and the annual financial settlements for local government across the UK done and dusted, we now know where budgets broadly stand, between now and 2020 and it’s taking local government expenditure to its lowest percentage of GDP since 1948.

The move to four year budgets in England will see significant further pain, on top of that already experienced, over the next couple of years, before a stabilisation in the latter years of that settlement. This of course optimistically assumes that there will not be a further recession during this period, high levels of house building will be achieved and the move to localise business rates will run smoothly and fairly.