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Strategic Public Finance takes a multidisciplinary approach to public finance. It considers the nature of public finance and its symbiotic relationship with economy and society. It considers its philosophical underpinnings, the nature of the services it finances, its relative scale, how it is raised and spent, its possible beneficial and adverse effects, its sustainability, the appropriate governmental level of decision making, the means by which it can be disbursed, and an optimal strategy for public finance

This paper examines recent policies to enhance the scope for choice by the users of local government services in England. It questions whether they can offset the progressively increasing restriction of local democratic choices that have resulted from the trend towards increasing centralisation of local finance and statutory controls over service standards.

The considerable academic literature on the assessment of municipal expenditure needs has generally paid much less attention to compensation for relatively high input costs. This is all the more surprising given that regional variations in input costs are a major cause of differences in municipalities' per capita expenditure needs. This paper considers the recent review and reform of the way in which account is taken of variations between English municipalities in the costs of their inputs. It discusses the arguments for and against equalisation of input costs and the advantages and disadvantages of the various possible ways in which to compensate municipalities for those input-cost differentials. Notwithstanding the recent reform, there remain a number of fundamental criticisms.

This article analyses the changing nature of quality assurance issues for the UK school meals service and presents the results of research into the impact on this service of the compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) regime. It considers the institutional and policy context within which the school meals service operates and shows how that context has qualified the maxim that the consumer knows best. Schools and their pupils have had little input into contract specifications for the school meals service. However, increased local discretion regarding the nutritional standards of school meals, the decentralisation to schools of responsibility for managing their own budgets and the growth of fast food' catering outlets outwith school premises are, in combination, increasing the power of school managers and of pupils themselves relative to that of the central offices and committees of local education authorities. Hence, the balance of power between different stakeholder groups is changing, so modifying perceptions of what constitutes quality of service.

This paper describes and analyses current and ongoing reforms of British local government in a public choice framework. These involve a shift from a vertically-integrated corporate institutional form of direct service provision by British local government to one of an enabling function within a horizontally- coordinated network of multi-agency service provision. It considers a fundamental reappraisal of the form of democracy and the way in which it can be secured, a questioning of the behavioural characteristics of local government in relation to the public interest, a reinstatement of the public interest, a reinstatement of the rights and responsibilities of the individual and of the family, a reduction of local government's role in providing the welfare state and a preference for multiple solutions provided by agencies in place of monolithic provision by local government monopolies. Such functional decentralisation is in marked contrast to the political decentralisation in other European countries.

'A Council's powers to raise taxes locally, and the grant it gets from the National Government should be designed to ensure that the Council can provide adequate services. They should also be designed to ensure that local electors know what the costs of their services are, so that armed with this knowledge they can influence the spending decisions of their Council through the ballot box.' (Cmnd 9714).