The County Councils Network has rejected claims that the fair funding review unfairly favours county areas.

Coastal heritage sites are set to be saved as a total of 23 projects are to receive a share of almost £1 million from the Coastal Revival Fund.

For a week in February, a large traffic monitoring exercise is to be carried out in Liverpool as part of the council’s city-wide air quality plan.
As part of the initiative, 40 cameras will count the amount of traffic, the type of vehicles and engine types on major routes into the city using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. This forms part of a £1.1 million government-funded programme which also includes installing air quality monitoring stations and updating modelling data for transport in the city region.

Nottingham City Council has set itself an ambitious target to become the first carbon neutral city in the UK.

A new report has concluded that the Department for Education does not fully understand what is driving demand for children’s social care.
The National Audit Office (NAO), which is critical of both the Department for Education and local authorities themselves, also claims that the government does not know why there is such wide variation between local authorities in their children’s social care activity and costs, as it has not yet done the work to tie together available sources of information.

MPs have warned over a succession of high-profile academy failures that have been costly to the taxpayer and damaging to children’s education.

The first cross-government suicide prevention plan has been published, with a focus on how social media can identify those at risk of suicide.

Leeds City Council has been given more than £29 million in funding from the government to implement a Clean Air Charging Zone in the city.
It is hoped that the Clean Air Charging Zone, which is set to go live from the 6 January 2020, will reduce air pollution in Leeds by encouraging businesses to transition to cleaner, less polluting vehicles that are not subject to charges for driving within the zone boundary.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester has pledged to improve the city-region’s bus network, including free bus travel for 16 to 18-year olds.

Oxfordshire County Council’s Smart City initiative is developing plans for new technology to identify crumbling road surfaces more quickly.