Public Services Management Update: Capital costs

Local authorities have increasingly used capital budgets to finance redundancy deals, according to the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. It calculates that last year pounds 107m of so-called capital expenditure actually went on redundancy costs, a rise of 62 per cent since 1990. CLES expects the figure to increase by another 30 per cent this year. The Institute of Housing calculates that if the last three years' redundancy capitalisation had been used for housing repairs it would have renovated 25,000 homes, creating 22,500 jobs.