The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) certainly aren't hanging around. Tomorrow marks the three month birthday of the new government - less than one hundred days - and already the department have gone to work on stripping out layers of bureaucracy, abolishing costly schemes and scrapping cumbersome quangos. Not everything they have done is necessarily fantastic - as my colleague Matt Sinclair pointed out yesterday - but you have to admire the speed at which they've approached the job at the very least.
Today saw another welcome announcement: Housing Minister Grant Shapps has scrapped the Place Survey, a costly postal scheme whose results fed in to the Comprehensive Area Assessments. Obviously these are now dead too, so it's good to see another centralised procedure abandoned. Speaking to councillors and local authority management, it's striking that authorities with high resident satisfaction complete their own versions of surveys - except they are not to meet central government targets. They are discussions with residents to find out exactly what services they want or need. On top of this, councils are then forced to take part in what is one of the biggest surveys in Europe, despite them knowing exactly what course of action they want to take in wards and neighbourhoods. A waste of a time and money, so it's good to see the back of it.