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News from the Director of the Centre for Cities

On Monday 29 October the Centre for Cities will be the UK's newest think tank. We will be spinning out from ippr and moving to our new offices at Enterprise House on the South Bank (just behind Oxo Tower).

During November and December, we will publish a series of four new reports:
London's Links - the impact of London's economy on the rest of the UK
UK Cities in the Global Economy - recent trends of globalisation, and opportunities for UK cities
City Solutions: Vehicles to Deliver Growth - potential new financial mechanisms for delivering housing targets
UK Cities Outlook 2008 - our flagship annual report, on the state of UK cities plus commentary on urban policy developments.

This week's Pre-Budget Report included the introduction of Business Rate Supplements, which we proposed last year and reported on in September with PWC. The Government's plans - set out in a White Paper yesterday - are more modest than ours, but signal a much firmer (and welcome) commitment than expected. See my blog for more.

We were at all three party conferences over the last month. Here is a short report of our six events, sponsored by Virgin Trains and DLA Piper. Speakers included Hazel Blears, Ruth Kelly, Alistair Burt and Simon Hughes - plus five of the eight core city leaders.

Some team news: Adam Marshall is now our Head of Policy and Glenn Athey is Head of Research. Our new Researcher, Faiza Baksh, joins us on 1 November. We will be recruiting a few more staff once we have settled into Enterprise House.

All the best, Dermot

Visit my blog for more regular updates.

Capable Communities

Public Service Reform: The next chapter

In this paper we turn our attention to the role citizens and communities can play in directly producing services, setting out the challenges that lie ahead, and identifying the questions our research will seek to answer over the coming months.