Councils in England are to be encouraged to sell publicly owned buildings and other ***** ets worth up to £23bn under plans being explored by ministers to plug budget shortfalls amid the crisis in local government.

Under plans being examined by Michael Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, councils would be given greater flexibility to use money raised from ***** et disposals to meet their budget pressures.

#budget #councils #department

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Ministers must urgently inject £4bn into English town hall budgets to head off an “out of control” financial crisis that threatens to drag well-run councils into bankruptcy and put local services at risk, a cross-party group of MPs has warned.

The levelling up, housing and communities committee said government must act now to help councils stricken by shrinking resources and the costs of rising demand for adult social care, child protection, homelessness and special educational needs provision.

#ministers #government #bankruptcy

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The former Tory MP Nadine Dorries has said she will pay back £16,876 she received in severance pay because of a mistake by the government.

The former cabinet minister, who resigned and triggered a byelection last year, received the money for her tenure as culture secretary under Boris Johnson. Under current rules it should not be paid to departing ministers over the age of 65, which she turned several months before leaving her job.

#minister #money #government

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UK ministers will aim to stop firms from skirting around an upcoming law that will outlaw disposable vapes by eliminating ruses such as attaching charging points on them, the health secretary has said.

The draft legislation, being introduced in parallel with an already-announced ban on selling tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, would be put together with the help of experts who would try to anticipate possible loopholes, Victoria Atkins added.

“We will listen very carefully to suggestions that big tobacco

#health #legislation #law

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Plans to clear the names of hundreds of post office operators wrongly convicted in the Horizon IT scandal will be announced “imminently”, a government minister has said.

The postal services minister, Kevin Hollinrake, said ministers were “definitely not ruling out” emergency legislation to quash all the convictions that arose from the Horizon scandal.