Speculation and leaks abound about the content of Wednesday’s Comprehensive Spending Review. Until the chancellor has spoken and the Treasury has published the statement and accompanying documents, we will not know the precise content. I suspect that it could be two months or so before we comprehend the detail of what the review means for specific services and the people they serve.
However, one important pointer will be the government’s decisions in respect of ‘place-based budgets’ or as they may be called ‘community-based budgets’. There is an opportunity here to rejuvenate Total Place.
Total Place offered a real opportunity for councils and their partners to pool and align resources to meet local need; to promote local well being; and to maximise both effectiveness and efficiency through re-designing services across institutional and professional boundaries, eliminating wasteful duplication, sharing properties, assets and people, and focusing on outcomes for people living in the place.
The logic of Total Place was for central government to allocate a single pot of revenue finance (and a single capital pot) to a locality – a form of local block grant. This would have included much but not all the public expenditure deployed in a locality. Such a pot could have a great deal more than the local authority’s own expenditure. Local authorities would have become strategic commissioners for health services, elements of policing and criminal justice services, education, aspects of the benefit and workless programmes, transport and other locally focused services.
Given the expected cuts across these and other public services such an approach would have been very beneficial. Moreover, it will be a lost opportunity if place-based budgets fail to be as comprehensive as this vision for Total Place.
Place-based budgets should mean that local government has more control and freedom over its own expenditure and that it may have some modest amount of additional monies under its direct control. These moves are welcome. However, local government controls less than 10% of total public expenditure (with dedicated schools budget excluded) in its area. So what about the remainder of the public expenditure?
There may be some prototype projects whereby some localities will be testing how they can manage some devolved funding for services beyond those controlled by local authorities. These are likely to be client- or service-orientated projects rather than holistic place approaches. The projects will be interesting and could be valuable means of demonstrating the practical implementation of what the Total Place pilots identified as real opportunities.
Local government, faced with massive cuts and the prospect that its key local partners will also be facing cuts, will need to consider how they can secure the best outcomes for their communities and citizens. They will need to practise strong and responsive political and managerial leadership based on a place-shaping approach. Securing outcomes, reshaping public services and minimising the damage of cuts will require leadership based on influence, networking, persuading, negotiating, and being prepared to cede budgets and services to others.
Even if government does not promote Total Place as a formal approach, this should not prevent localities adopting such an approach. This will be more difficult should Whitehall pressure and encouragement be diminished. In these circumstances it may be more difficult to get all of the key agencies on board. But it will not be impossible. Nor should it not be pursued. Indeed, many local authorities and their partners have already decided to pursue their own version of Total Place – although they may give it another name.
In order to progress this approach some places are realising that the demise of Comprehensive Area Agreements and now Local Area Agreements as well as the withdrawal of ring-fenced funding that had to be handled by local strategic partnerships (LSPs) brings into question the traditional LSP model.
Some will drive their local agenda through public service boards – some politically led and some officer led; more joint commissioning; new outcome focused partnerships which bring together the organisations and budgets that can deliver defined service and financial objectives; and others are adopting a more loyalist approach whereby they are devolving budgets and decisions to neighbourhoods or clusters of local communities. These rightly will be local responses and local solutions to meet local needs and aspirations.
Partnership working across the public sector in a locality is essential for a range of policy and well being objectives including facilitating Big Society approaches; building community capacity; economic regeneration; and much more. Localities will find their own approaches with partnerships and other arrangements based on a range of spatial, agency, governance and budget arrangements.
The government’s commitment to localism and the devolution of more responsibility and authority together with accountability to localities and local government is a move in the right direction. However, central government has a role to play too. It should foster and promote the concept of Total Place or place-based budgets from every Whitehall department and not just CLG; enable GP consortia and others to pool budgets and/or partner with local authorities to jointly commission services; and ensure that all local agencies including agencies of the Department of Work & Pensions are empowered to make local decisions and sue their resources in the spirit of place-based budgets.
George Osborne has the opportunity to send the right signal on Wednesday. Let’s hope that he sends it with clarity and enthusiasm.
John Tizard is director of the Centre for Public Service Partnerships (CPSP@LGiU)
