Public opinion: Your blogs

Let’s have more ‘new conversations’

The theme of the final day of Smart City Futures - which took place in Salford yesterday - was ‘the new conversation’.

A regal start to second year of funding for community spaces

What would you do if you ever had the honour of meeting royalty? Better still, what would you do if a member of the royal family were to pay you a visit to see the fruits of your labour, a project that your community had put its very heart and soul into?

The Ventnor Botanic Garden Friends' Society, in the Isle of Wight, were lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it!) enough to find out exactly how it feels as they recently prepared for a visit from His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall.

Social mobility: Labour was right to start with the young

It’s true they were. Right to start with the young that is. To start with Sure Start, Children’s Centres, investing in primary education, community nurseries and tax credits. These interventions all have the right intentions at their core – to ensure that children born to poorer parents have the same life chances as children born to richer parents. However it’s now time to turn our attention to teenagers.

Banking reform? More like business as usual!

The Conservatives and Labour have both been setting out their plans for banking reform over the past week or two. First we had the government's ‘Reforming Financial Markets' White Paper - http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/reforming_financial_markets.htm - with Alistair Darling setting out proposals that seem incredibly modest, relative to the scale of the recent banking crisis.

At a whopping 176 pages it's not the friendliest White Paper you'll ever see and its length and the jargon-heavy tone somewhat undermine its talk of ‘consumers being better informed'. Cynics might even suggest it's designed to exclude consumers from actually engaging with the subject of banking reform.

Think rural, act rural

‘Rural proofing' is a deceptively simple concept. It's a government commitment that as policy is developed and implemented, policy makers should: think about possible differential impacts in rural areas; assess what these might be; and then plan and deliver appropriate adjustments.

It’s time to revive that spirit of civic activism

Here's a conundrum: help your town or city survive the recession and create new jobs and opportunities. Do it with fewer resources and, while you're about it, see if you can eliminate poverty.

One answer may be a rediscovery of interventionist municipalism. This is a throwback - or maybe the faintest echo of a throwback - to the civic activism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where cities laid down roads and sewers, put up buildings, and housed the workers.

Where should we put the ‘evidence base’ for policy?

We all know that public policies these days 'should' be based on evidence; but I'm not clear about when and how the full might of rational thought is best brought into the public policy arena. We seem sometimes to have mislaid the 'politics' part of 'policy', in our reliance on 'the evidence'....

Villages need to act now to avoid becoming like ghost towns

The Rural Shops Alliance, National Housing Federation and British Beer and Pub Association estimate 1,000 country pubs and village shops could close during the coming year due to the shortage of affordable homes in rural areas.

It’s clear many villages are becoming the equivalent of ghost towns and their communities need to act urgently to stem the tide.