Necessity is the mother of invention. So, with revenue funding for local government cut by 26%, all sorts of things that were once unimaginable suddenly look eminently doable.
Councils are busy trying to bribe – sorry, ‘nudge’ – residents into volunteering for the Big Society, so that unaffordable services can somehow be provided. And as they contemplate next month’s local authority finance settlement, council leaders are displaying new enthusiasm for the hitherto Platonic ideal of shared services.
Three west London councils are planning to merge most of their back-office, and many front-office, functions. Elsewhere, moves are under way for councils and NHS organisations to join forces.
In these straitened times, when there is serious talk of authorities going bust, fiscal pragmatism is the order of the day. After all, if British and French defence forces can bite the proverbial bullet and sign up to military co-operation, surely councils can overcome a few little local turf wars?
Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles certainly thinks so. He questions whether councils need to have separate education or planning departments, and urges them to use decentralised budgets to ‘pool and prioritise’.
So why does this gung-ho approach not seem to extend to the one big idea that looked promising in this regard: Total Place?
Instead of rolling out this ‘single pot’ funding initiative, the CSR announced only 16 ‘community-based budgets’, focused on families with complex needs.
The Department for Communities and Local Government seems to have failed to win buy-in – most importantly from the Treasury – for the one measure that could have significantly strengthened localism.
Perversely, complex new benefit rules might actually be about to pit councils against each other, giving them an incentive to move poorer families (many with ‘complex needs’) out of their areas. The Institute for Fiscal Studies certainly thinks so (see 'Councils have ‘incentive and means to force out poor’, warns IFS').
Meanwhile, Total Place appears to have been strangled at birth. Possibly because it’s too associated with the ancien régime of CAAs and LAAs. Or perhaps, as Dan Corry (see 'Suspension of belief') suggests, because funding is still too attached to Whitehall’s silos – and they’re not in a sharing mood.
Whatever the case, when it comes to empowering local government, the entente cordiale does not seem to extend much beyond empty gestures. Malheureusement, we’ve been here before.
Judy Hirst is deputy editor of Public Finance
