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Local councils are an essential player and are encouraged to be “ambitious and innovative” in driving supply. This Housing Delivery Toolkit sets out how councils can use their powers, influence and resources to intervene in local markets to increase the scale and pace of housing supply in their areas.

The 2017 White Paper ‘Fixing our broken housing market’ sets out the case for ‘radical, lasting reform’ of the housing market in England It details the crisis of affordability, in both the owner-occupied and private rented sectors and proposes measures to reform the planning process, build homes faster and diversify the range of supply in the housing market.

Local Partnerships are grateful for the co-operation of Browne Jacobson LLP who have worked with us on the development and update of this toolkit.

We have our NEW – Housing Delivery Toolkit 2023 – download here 

Newcastle & North Tyneside Street Lighting

Energy efficient street lighting

Local Partnerships is supporting local authorities to deliver LED street lighting initiatives – successful schemes could deliver up to 80 per cent energy savings and significant cuts to utility bills.

Recent technological advances and the falling costs of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting (around 30 per cent a year) means that the case for switching to energy efficient lighting has never been stronger. The much lower energy usage of LED lighting can dramatically reduce operating costs and CO2 emissions as well as other benefits such as enhance public safety, minimise light pollution and making public spaces friendlier at night.

Are you working on transformation and complex change?

Does your organisation know its capability to deliver major change?

Use Local Partnerships’ Delivery Capability Status (DCS) Toolkit to evaluate your delivery capability quickly and simply.

The DCS toolkit is a free self-assessment that will evaluate your organisation’s capability to execute major change. Local Partnerships will work with you to identify how your organisation can improve its delivery capability. This free self-assessment will provide an overview of where your organisation stands

Across Britain, councils are taking action to boost renewable generation, improve energy security, lower energy bills and support community economies by seizing opportunities to get involved with energy supply. By doing so, they provide customers with an alternative to the big utility companies and are capitalising on emerging trends in energy production and transportation. These place locally-focussed energy ventures centre stage.

Local authorities have the potential to deliver on a range of energy projects:

• energy consumption (e.g. by reducing spend on energy supplied to council-owned buildings),
• energy supply (e.g. by becoming a fully licensed or white label energy supplier to residents and businesses),
• and energy generation (e.g. using council owned assets to generate local power from natural sources and generate income)

Local authorities are undoubtedly prioritising and developing their commercial activity, pursuing new alliances, structures and delivery models. All these initiatives need to be underpinned by business cases and supported through planning and implementation – areas of core expertise for Local Partnerships.

From the work that Local Partnerships has been undertaking with various social enterprises and public sector programmes, we have seen the widespread value in developing a Theory of Change.

This value can be seen both by the leadership of an organisation or programme as well as frontline staff.

A Theory of Change can also be used with good effect in conversation with partner organisations, funders, commissioners and/or customers. Some may argue that Theory of Change is an academic concept or too technical a piece of terminology. Our clients express how much they have valued taking the time to analyse why they exist and how their work can be measured and communicated to a wide set of stakeholders. We believe there are a variety of reasons why one would invest time to develop a robust Theory of Change.