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Urban modelling is a difficult and complex art. We might seek to reduce it to simplicity of a computer strategy game like Sim City – place a cop station here and see crime reduce overnight (something it singularly never seemed to achieve on my stretch of the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd’s Bush in the mid-noughties). So much of the energy in recent years has been expended debating whether there is such a thing as a ‘smart city’ and if there was (which there is) a fixation on big data as the IT salesman’s salvation to directing the flow of resources, infrastructure, transport and public ...

Almost a tenth of top-tier English councils are at risk of financial failure due to high funding gaps and low levels of reserves, according to the

Sector recovery: a think-tank has concluded pubs need a permanent VAT reduction and beer duty cut to thrive post-lockdown (images: Martin Parratt, Getty Images) The Government should support the pub sector’s recovery by slashing taxes and providing top-up grant support, a new report has claimed. Think-tank Localis concluded top-up grants should be used to help pubs in ‘left-behind places’ such as coastal towns or former industrial communities in 2022.  In the report, titled ‘The Power of Pubs – protecting social infrastructure and laying the groundwork ...

If the government wants to avoid infantilizing local government it needs to restore a sense of trust, writes Jonathan Werran, chief executive of Localis.

We start the year with the usual problem around unitarization. Not the lumpenproblem of what to do and how to govern the great swathes of retro (not metro) England. The recovery and devolution white paper can, which has been kicked down the road to the year’s end, may resolve this in some dilute form. No, it’s Anglo-Saxon attitudes and the 10 th century unitarisation of England and the inescapable problems jerry-built into the foundations of our ramshackle early modern constitution. Hence the creaking perils of keeping an unhappy domestic union intact one full year after the UK divorced f...