This year's annual conference not only tackles a key challenge for local government, prejudice, but also focuses on the solutions to the problems that you have told us are the priorities.

The conference addresses how you can marshal the evidence that can provide the basis to develop strategies to grow social capital and strengthen community cohesion. It then examines how you can use this evidence to counter prejudice and false perceptions. It will be very practically based but will draw on high level research in the best tradition of the networks run by the Local Government Centre at Warwick Business School.

The conference will be opened by Angela Mason OBE. Angela, the former executive director of Stonewall, was appointed head of the government's women and equality group in 2002 and was the civil servant responsible for steering the Equality Act 2006 through Parliament which established the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She is currently National Advisor on Equality and Diversity at the IDeA. Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP who leads the Conservative Party's Social Justice Policy Group will give the after-dinner speech on his recently produced report "Breakthrough Britain?"