Dear colleagues. You don't need me to tell you how tough the past 14 years have been at times. Today is most likely to be the start of a new era for government in the UK, and with it a new opportunity for us to shout from the rooftops about both the perilous state of the sector, but also the central importance of our beloved local government to a renewed and re-energised country.

From Big Society to Levelling Up, few of the positive policy interventions have come close to outweighing the pressures put on you by losing more than half of your funding through austerity, coupled with population pressures and once in a generation events like the Covid pandemic.