Responding to the crunch

Abstract

As practitioners, policy-makers and politicians continue to operate in such fragile economic conditions, questions are being asked in relation to responding to the crunch and planning for the upturn. Indeed, a Government colleague contacted me at work the other day in a rush to gather some intelligence on ‘what local authorities are doing to respond to the recession’. Apparently, a Minister had been getting ‘quite vocal that he isn’t hearing about what local authorities are doing and so we’re compiling evidence of what we are doing to help people at the current time’. So in addition to supplying information about what I was doing on behalf of Durham County Council and the County Durham Economic Partnership, I decided to initiate a fact finding mission of what others are doing within the North East and further afield