This week's podcast is a first: a live show, recorded, warts and all, at the New Local Government Network's (NLGN) conference on Thursday 22 February.

That event took place in the events space at London's Guildhall - essentially, the town hall for the ancient City of London, which is pretty appropriate when discussing the future of local government. Slightly more confusingly, it was recorded in the West Crypt, which is, as the name implies, a crypt.

Anyway. During the course of the discussion we covered the challenges facing local government; the radical steps this is forcing them to take to survive; and the prospects for devolution. My quite excellent panel for the event included Piali Das Gupta, head of policy at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (Solace); Chris Naylor, chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham; Kathryn Rees, assistant director of Transformation at Wigan council; and Jessica Studdert, deputy director of our kind hosts, NLGN.

Doing a live podcast was, despite some jitters, tremendous fun. So if this is the sort of thing you'd be interested in attending some time, possibly in a pub, drop me a line to let me know.

Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge.

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