Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will be among the speakers at the Local Government Association’s annual conference in Harrogate this week.

About 1,600 delegates are expected to attend the three-day event, which gets underway tomorrow at Harrogate Convention Centre.

It will be the first LGA conference held during a Labour government since 2009 and Ms Rayner’s speech, delivered six days before the Budget, will be eagerly awaited. Ms Rayner, who is also Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, may give some clues about what is expected.

She will speak in a 30-minute plenary session alongside housing minister Jim McMahon and Bev Craig, the Labour leader of Manchester City Council, on Thursday (October 24).

Other conference speakers include Richard Fuller, the Conservative Party chairman, Vikki Slade, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for housing, communities and local government, former Olympic javelin thrower Fatima Whitbread and LGA president Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson.

The conference is the one time each year when senior councillors and officers from all of the LGA’s 337 member councils in England and Wales gather.

Councillor Gareth Dadd, deputy leader of North Yorkshire Council, will give a ‘welcome to North Yorkshire’ speech on the opening day.

One of the workshop sessions is about North Yorkshire Council’s attempts to save time for practitioners children’s social care, which will be led by three officers at the council. 

Besides the programme of speeches and workshops during each day, fringe events take place throughout the town at night.

The programme is available here.