Recurring digital payments have quietly become a fixed feature of household finances across the UK, Europe and the United States. For revenues and benefits services, understanding their scale, their cross-national consistency — and their ambiguous status as essential or discretionary spending — is becoming increasingly relevant. Revenues & Benefits Intelligence · Briefing Note The Scale…
Category: Governance
When Systems Collide: Supported Housing, Reorganisation and Poverty in Local Government
The Independent Revenues and Benefits Monday Discussion Group on 30 March ranged across three familiar but connected themes: supported housing, local government reorganisation and the latest poverty figures. What tied the conversation together was a persistent sense that national systems are still passing risk, cost and confusion down to councils, while expecting local services to…
Youth jobs, council tax support and the case for deeper reform
Reflections from the Independent Revenues and Benefits Monday Discussion Group This week’s Independent Revenues and Benefits Monday Discussion Group ranged widely, but two themes dominated the discussion: the government’s latest youth employment package, and the continuing argument over council tax support, Universal Credit and the wider future of local taxation. As ever, the session brought…
Independent R&B Monday Discussion Group: Spring Statement review: what revenues and benefits practitioners heard beneath the headlines
The latest Independent Revenues and Benefits Monday Discussion Group took the Chancellor’s Spring Statement as its starting point and asked a simple question: what does it really mean when viewed from the frontline of local government? The answer from practitioners was clear enough. However upbeat the national presentation may have sounded, the local picture still…
The future of work, and what it means for revenues and benefits teams
The Independent Revenues and Benefits Monday Discussion Group spent much of its 2 March session exploring a question that is rapidly moving from policy theory into operational reality: what does the changing world of work mean for local authority services, especially revenues, benefits, council tax support, customer services and fraud? The discussion ranged across labour…
Briefing note: fiscal and economic context and what it means for local tax, welfare support and local government finance (March 2026)
Purpose To set out a single, joined up view of the national economic and fiscal outlook, and the practical implications for council tax, council tax reduction (CTR), local welfare support (including DHP and crisis type schemes), benefits and social security, business rates, housing, local government finance, and local government reorganisation (LGR). This note draws on…
Independent R&B Monday Discussion Group: Reforming Council Tax & Adult Social Care, Income Maximisation Calculators and Welsh Poverty
Meeting note for 16 February 2026 The group focused on two linked themes that continue to dominate local public service delivery: whether council tax and adult social care should be reformed in tandem; and whether digital income maximisation tools, particularly online benefit calculators, are being unfairly criticised for access problems that sit elsewhere in the…
Independent R&B Monday Discussion Group: CTR judicial reviews, transitional protection, and scheme governance
Meeting note for 9 February 2026 The slide pack is too large to send by email this week. Please download it from is page, alongside the recording and other related reports. The pack is large because it contains significant slides on CTR case law and the Gunning principles. Malcolm Gardner opened with tributes to John…
Independent R&B Monday Discussion Group: Blue Monday session roundup
19 January 2026 (12:02pm) The group marked “Blue Monday” with a mixture of humour and hard reality: policy change arriving at speed, year-end pressures stacking up, and councils trying to keep services stable while funding assumptions shift under their feet. Malcolm Gardner chaired the session, with contributions from Naomi Armstrong, Kirsty Brooksmith, Nicki Duckworth, Michael…
Monday Discussion Group, 12 January 2026: transparency, microwaves, beach huts and the fine art of “savings”
We reconvened for the first session of 2026 with Malcolm Gardner in the chair, supported by Nicki Duckworth, and a familiar cast of local government finance, revenues and welfare experts, including Naomi Armstrong, Paul Howarth, Gareth Morgan, Laura Bessell, Kirsty Brooksmith, Michael Fisher, Bob Wagstaff, Robert Fox, Richard Hanby, Peter Haywood and others. The meeting…