Cardiff Council will today launch a crackdown on parking as they take over responsibility for enforcing parking regulations. Dubbed the ‘reign of terror’, it will include doubling parking fines— £70 for some offences and £50 for others; increasing the time wardens patrol from 7am to 10pm and issuing them with new technology to log all offences. The council has also spent £500,000 repainting double-yellow lines to ensure rule breakers cannot argue their way out of fines.

It has emerged that council bosses in Birmingham paid a string of celebrities a combined £50,000 to back events and hand out awards. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act showed the authority spent £79,909 on hiring celebrities from 2006 to 2009, of that amount, £27,000 was raised through sponsorship, leaving a total of £52,909 funded by taxpayers. Celebrities hired included ex-EastEnders actor Shaun Williamson, TV chef Phil Vickery and former BBC news presenter Ashley Blake.

Following the government’s emergency budget Leicester City Council is predicting it will have to make £100m worth of cuts to services and axe 1,000 jobs over the next four years. Bosses have warned that every department is likely to be affected, and that "tough decisions" will have to be made. The city council's existing budget is £278m, two-thirds of which is made up by the local government settlement grant which is handed out by the Department of Communities and Local Government with local authorities finding out in late November what their share of the grant will be. The other third of the council’s budget comes from council tax.

Engineers in Hereford have resorted to black gaffer tape to protect shoppers as Hereford Council have been left puzzled as to why so many shoppers have fallen over a new lowered kerbside. The £1.3m repaving project, led by international consultants, has resulted in a spate of trips and falls as at least two pedestrians have broken bones in the month since a new stone surface was laid in semi-pedestrianised Widemarsh Street. Contractors have therefore, “installed” a three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick line of black gaffer tape along the edge of the pavement, Herefordshire Council said the low-tech solution is a temporary fix.