Paving the way for the emergency Budget, Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, is encouraging councils to work together to jointly buy goods and services to achieve major economies of scale through better deals from suppliers. That’s good news – I want to see my income and council tax being well used. But ministers and council leaders should not assume that bulk buying from large organisations is the only way to bring costs down.

Small businesses like mine offer very competitive rates for specialised services. We run our businesses on a shoestring without the overheads of large consultancies. Councils and other public sector organisations should consider how their buying decisions can support small, local enterprises which make such an important contribution to the economy.

Hello and welcome to the Celandine blog. I hope you will find it useful, interesting and enjoyable to dip into. Please add your own comments, though of course they will be moderated for all the usual reasons.

Starting the blog is a great thing for me. I hope to comment on what is going on in the housing world and to add the occasional light-hearted touch to relieve the present gloom of cuts and efficiencies.

I’m sure that, like me, you are struggling to absorb the implications of all the changes coming out from Government. It started with abolition of HIPs and regional housing targets. Now we hear that density targets have been relaxed, regulation of the private rented sector and ‘garden grabbing’ are off the agenda,  and that the Housing Minister is backing shared ownership and local housing trusts to deliver new housing.

It is not easy to see how new homes  – which are still badly needed -  will be built in sufficient numbers, will be affordable and will be of high enough quality to stand the test of time. Those of us working in housing will have to forget old ways of working and rapidly come up with new ideas about how the new policies can be made to work for people who are overcrowded, homeless or priced out of the market. Hoping that the CIH conference in Harrogate later this month will generate some of the new ideas. I look forward to joining in the debate!

The new government tells us  that from now on decisions on housing supply will rest with local planning authorities without the framework of regional numbers and plans. Those same local authorities have  to make financial cuts this year with more to come in the Budget. At the same time, Conservative planning policy, ‘Open Source Planning’, looks to councils to develop new local house- building policies based on the wishes of the community. How can councils create new planning policy at a time of spending restraint? Will this bring house-building to a standstill or lead to uncontrolled development that does not match up with local needs? The solution must lie, at least in part, in neighbouring councils working together, pooling staff and resources to create policies that work for  all of them.