By Sue Goss | 1 February 2012
Whole Place is the new Total Place, as community budgeting helps both town halls and Whitehall free up their fiscal thinking. So are the chances of joined-up spending better or worse in an era of austerity?
The four new ‘whole-place’ Community Budget pilots are the latest in a series of experiments bringing Whitehall and local government together in an effort to galvanise local innovation. How can this latest attempt overcome the problems encountered in the past?
Each initiative has confronted the same tension at the heart of central-local relationships. As councils provide services that are core to government strategy, ministers are seldom able to resist the temptation to drive policy from the centre – even when they recognise that locally designed solutions are more efficient.
Councils have argued for years that they are best able to bring together local partners to address local problems, but as long as central government is paying at least part of the bill, ministers feel legitimately entitled to direct the action.
The latest initiative might have a fairer wind than its predecessors. The Blair/Brown governments were assertive about centrally driven programmes and targets. However, the coalition government agrees, ideologically at least, with the idea that change should emerge from the bottom rather than being driven from the top. In addition, the downsizing of central government departments might help to loosen their grip. But in the end, despite all the talk of localism, ministers will still want to feel that their most cherished goals are being pursued locally.
Attempts to devolve responsibilities from Whitehall have been tried with varying degrees of success since the New Deal for Communities in 1998. After the NDC came Area Based Initiatives, then Local Strategic Partnerships and Community Strategies, Local Public Service Agreements, Local Area Agreements 1 and 2, Total Place and now Community Budgets.
Each used the language of local freedoms and flexibilities, emphasising the importance of ‘adult-adult’ relationships between central and local government, partnership working at locality level, sharing outcomes, reducing bureaucracy and removing barriers stopping organisations working together.
Cynics talk about a localism ‘groundhog day’: each time local government begins with high expectations of new freedoms, but over the months, the attention of senior officials and ministers gives way to process monitoring, and the promise of change is scaled back, Whitehall finds reasons to avoid any real transfer of power and the initiative is replaced by a new one.
But such a reading is too pessimistic. While progress has always proved difficult, an important kernel of learning has enabled each initiative to build on, and advance beyond, its predecessor.
For LPSAs, the step forward was the recognition between local government and Whitehall of a shared set of priorities. Similarly, Local Area Agreements built on this by bringing together all the local partners to focus on shared outcomes. Most recently, Total Place recognised the scope for rethinking the use of all the public spending in an area, and stressed the importance of ‘systems thinking’ to redesign services.
The 16 Community Budget pilots that preceded the latest crop developed this thinking around families with complex needs and the latest ‘whole-place’ pilots add three new dimensions.
The first of these is austerity. Since the pilots are being launched in parallel with up to 30% cuts in local authority budgets, they are of course focused on achieving more for less.
The second is the promise of finally being able to pool budgets. Up till now, localities have found the barriers too great and have concentrated on aligning budgets.
The third is a strong interest in moving very expensive interventions ‘upstream’ so that joined-up investment in prevention can reduce levels of dependency and antisocial behaviour, improve the responsibility of individuals and cut costs for the health, social care and criminal justice systems.
Local authorities argue they can no longer afford to work in old ways. Only by redesigning services across the ‘whole system’ of a locality can they continue to serve their communities well. Although just four whole-place pilots have been announced – Cheshire West and Chester, Greater Manchester councils, Essex and West London – a wider group of local authorities will be experimenting alongside them and hoping to share learning as they progress.
The chosen pilots each focus on different areas. The ‘tri-borough’ West London pilot – incorporating Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea councils – will prioritise skills and training for over-16s, along with parallel work on youth violence and antisocial behaviour. The Greater Manchester pilot, covering the ten councils in the metropolitan area, will focus on supporting economic growth and tackling dependency on public services of families with complex needs. These are certainly ambitious agendas involving multiple agencies.
This time, instead of government funding to ‘reward’ local outcomes, the focus is on involving Whitehall directly in the shared ‘working out’ of solutions to complex problems. By sending in teams of senior civil servants from eight departments, Whitehall hopes to learn first hand about how different interventions interact, and will work with localities to devise radical solutions.
This might be one of the most important innovations this time round. Instead of being overloaded with guidance and monitoring, the four pilots will have time to think and resources to help. The success of these teams will depend on the seniority and commitment of the civil servants chosen, and on how they are created. They will need to develop a new culture and new working practices, reflecting neither Whitehall nor local government but an interesting hybrid.
The teams will be given 18 months to redesign services and government interventions and show how pooled budgets can spend public money in more effective ways. The hope is that by demonstrating ‘proof of concept’ – by showing how these local solutions would save billions of pounds – ministers and civil servants will finally be persuaded to allow the freedoms that have eluded local government so far.
The four pilot areas are well advanced in their own radical thinking and practice and well positioned to take this forward. It will be interesting to see how the shared Whitehall teams work and what we can all learn from this. But perhaps the most difficult question to answer will be – will this save money? Will the projects show significant cashable savings through innovation? It is here that we need to be reasonable in our expectations. Eighteen months is not a long time, and the pilot sites will not be able to put plans fully into action in that time, let alone register changes to complex social outcomes.
Learning how to count potential savings is likely to be important. The Total Place pilots found that simply counting everything did little more than shock us about the many billions of pounds being spent on the current ineffective systems. It proved more effective to develop radical proposals for intervention, cost these, and then track back to identify the savings that could be made by dismantling less effective services. Of course, some savings come from removing duplication and streamlining current services, but the big prize will be redesigning interventions so that we can prevent the costly social problems that would otherwise occur.
Here, there are reasons to be cautious. Assuming that early intervention or prevention work for only a percentage of the time, higher cost services will still be needed, even if the demand is lessened.
At the Office for Public Management we have been evaluating a number of early interventions and developing robust methodologies that can demonstrate substantial reduced risk, for example of problem behaviour. But it is not so easy to translate this into the sorts of certainties that will enable organisations to confidently dismantle or scale down current delivery systems. There will be differential time lags; we are dealing with probabilities; and the recession or other environmental factors might mean that the best we can do is to prevent outcomes from getting worse, rather than making them better.
It can also be difficult to attribute causality, let alone to find ways to change things. Prevention, by definition, means that things don’t happen – but it is difficult to be precise about what would have happened if the prevention spending had not occurred. How easy is it to measure long-term savings from preventing unhappiness, instability, rage, mental health problems or loneliness?
Caution is also needed because understanding the value of prevention doesn’t mean we know how to achieve it. For example, we know that if more adults took exercise, we could save the NHS millions of pounds. But despite many programmes, there has been little improvement in the proportion of adults taking exercise. Is this because the analysis of the problems was wrong? Or because the initiatives were ill-conceived? Or didn’t reach the right people? Or just that changing adult behaviour is difficult and requires a combination of interventions that we haven’t yet arrived at? The complexities are too great to answer these questions without a lot of extra work and trial and error.
Nor do we always know exactly why things do work. Some ingredients of success, such as charismatic leadership, a learning approach, dedicated individuals and deep understanding, can be the hardest to ‘roll out’ and ‘scale up’.
The Community Budget pilots are exploring the potential for what Thomas Kuhn identified as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the 1960s. As he noted, even when evidence begins to mount up, it takes years for professional practice to change. At all levels of the system there are vested interests in the status quo: people who were trained in the current system, whose careers depend on the continuity of current processes, who are so used to looking at problems in a certain way that they discount evidence of better approaches. A paradigm shift is not simply about innovation, it’s about dismantling the way things are currently done.
For local government, these experiments are real. Councils and partners want to implement change and make things happen because they can no longer afford to do things in the old ways.
The danger is that for central government the pilots will remain simply experiments – and the proof is not deemed ‘sufficient’ to persuade Whitehall departments of the need for change. When money is scarce and political tempers are short, unorthodox approaches seem risky. It is in the nature of experiments that they fail. Often several attempts are required before they succeed. If Apple’s Steve Jobs had been required to provide advance proof of the effectiveness of his investment in R&D, it’s unlikely that the Mac, iPod and iPad would have been developed.
What is needed now is the confidence to take a leap into the unknown. These experiments offer an opportunity to create a safer and more structured environment to try new things – since they bring together key decision makers at the centre with those at locality level – and to create the sort of dialogue that might lead to a breakthrough. This will only happen with a joint spirit of endeavour – a willingness to challenge received assumptions, and the courage to try new things. Whatever else, the four pilots will be a fascinating experiment in whether behaviour at all levels of government can change.
Sue Goss is head of the local government practice at the independent Office for Public Management. She has also supported the South of Tyne Total Place pilot and organised a simulation of a whole-place community budget pilot www.opm.co.uk
Whole Place is the new Total Place, as community budgeting helps both town halls and Whitehall free up their fiscal thinking. So are the chances of joined-up spending better or worse in an era of austerity?
The four new ‘whole-place’ Community Budget pilots are the latest in a series of experiments bringing Whitehall and local government together in an effort to galvanise local innovation. How can this latest attempt overcome the problems encountered in the past? Each initiative has confronted the same tension at the heart of central-local relationships. As councils provide services that are core to government strategy, ministers are seldom able to resist the temptation to drive policy from the centre – even when they recognise that locally designed solutions are more efficient.
Councils have argued for years that they are best able to bring together local partners to address local problems, but as long as central government is paying at least part of the bill, ministers feel legitimately entitled to direct the action.
The latest initiative might have a fairer wind than its predecessors. The Blair/Brown governments were assertive about centrally driven programmes and targets. However, the coalition government agrees, ideologically at least, with the idea that change should emerge from the bottom rather than being driven from the top. In addition, the downsizing of central government departments might help to loosen their grip. But in the end, despite all the talk of localism, ministers will still want to feel that their most cherished goals are being pursued locally.
Attempts to devolve responsibilities from Whitehall have been tried with varying degrees of success since the New Deal for Communities in 1998. After the NDC came Area Based Initiatives, then Local Strategic Partnerships and Community Strategies, Local Public Service Agreements, Local Area Agreements 1 and 2, Total Place and now Community Budgets.
Each used the language of local freedoms and flexibilities, emphasising the importance of ‘adult-adult’ relationships between central and local government, partnership working at locality level, sharing outcomes, reducing bureaucracy and removing barriers stopping organisations working together.
Cynics talk about a localism ‘groundhog day’: each time local government begins with high expectations of new freedoms, but over the months, the attention of senior officials and ministers gives way to process monitoring, and the promise of change is scaled back, Whitehall finds reasons to avoid any real transfer of power and the initiative is replaced by a new one.
But such a reading is too pessimistic. While progress has always proved difficult, an important kernel of learning has enabled each initiative to build on, and advance beyond, its predecessor.
For LPSAs, the step forward was the recognition between local government and Whitehall of a shared set of priorities. Similarly, Local Area Agreements built on this by bringing together all the local partners to focus on shared outcomes. Most recently, Total Place recognised the scope for rethinking the use of all the public spending in an area, and stressed the importance of ‘systems thinking’ to redesign services.
The 16 Community Budget pilots that preceded the latest crop developed this thinking around families with complex needs and the latest ‘whole-place’ pilots add three new dimensions.
The first of these is austerity. Since the pilots are being launched in parallel with up to 30% cuts in local authority budgets, they are of course focused on achieving more for less.
The second is the promise of finally being able to pool budgets. Up till now, localities have found the barriers too great and have concentrated on aligning budgets.
The third is a strong interest in moving very expensive interventions ‘upstream’ so that joined-up investment in prevention can reduce levels of dependency and antisocial behaviour, improve the responsibility of individuals and cut costs for the health, social care and criminal justice systems.
Local authorities argue they can no longer afford to work in old ways. Only by redesigning services across the ‘whole system’ of a locality can they continue to serve their communities well. Although just four whole-place pilots have been announced – Cheshire West and Chester, Greater Manchester councils, Essex and West London – a wider group of local authorities will be experimenting alongside them and hoping to share learning as they progress.
The chosen pilots each focus on different areas. The ‘tri-borough’ West London pilot – incorporating Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea councils – will prioritise skills and training for over-16s, along with parallel work on youth violence and antisocial behaviour. The Greater Manchester pilot, covering the ten councils in the metropolitan area, will focus on supporting economic growth and tackling dependency on public services of families with complex needs. These are certainly ambitious agendas involving multiple agencies.
This time, instead of government funding to ‘reward’ local outcomes, the focus is on involving Whitehall directly in the shared ‘working out’ of solutions to complex problems. By sending in teams of senior civil servants from eight departments, Whitehall hopes to learn first hand about how different interventions interact, and will work with localities to devise radical solutions.
This might be one of the most important innovations this time round. Instead of being overloaded with guidance and monitoring, the four pilots will have time to think and resources to help. The success of these teams will depend on the seniority and commitment of the civil servants chosen, and on how they are created. They will need to develop a new culture and new working practices, reflecting neither Whitehall nor local government but an interesting hybrid.
The teams will be given 18 months to redesign services and government interventions and show how pooled budgets can spend public money in more effective ways. The hope is that by demonstrating ‘proof of concept’ – by showing how these local solutions would save billions of pounds – ministers and civil servants will finally be persuaded to allow the freedoms that have eluded local government so far.
The four pilot areas are well advanced in their own radical thinking and practice and well positioned to take this forward. It will be interesting to see how the shared Whitehall teams work and what we can all learn from this. But perhaps the most difficult question to answer will be – will this save money? Will the projects show significant cashable savings through innovation? It is here that we need to be reasonable in our expectations. Eighteen months is not a long time, and the pilot sites will not be able to put plans fully into action in that time, let alone register changes to complex social outcomes.
Learning how to count potential savings is likely to be important. The Total Place pilots found that simply counting everything did little more than shock us about the many billions of pounds being spent on the current ineffective systems. It proved more effective to develop radical proposals for intervention, cost these, and then track back to identify the savings that could be made by dismantling less effective services. Of course, some savings come from removing duplication and streamlining current services, but the big prize will be redesigning interventions so that we can prevent the costly social problems that would otherwise occur.
Here, there are reasons to be cautious. Assuming that early intervention or prevention work for only a percentage of the time, higher cost services will still be needed, even if the demand is lessened.
At the Office for Public Management we have been evaluating a number of early interventions and developing robust methodologies that can demonstrate substantial reduced risk, for example of problem behaviour. But it is not so easy to translate this into the sorts of certainties that will enable organisations to confidently dismantle or scale down current delivery systems. There will be differential time lags; we are dealing with probabilities; and the recession or other environmental factors might mean that the best we can do is to prevent outcomes from getting worse, rather than making them better.
It can also be difficult to attribute causality, let alone to find ways to change things. Prevention, by definition, means that things don’t happen – but it is difficult to be precise about what would have happened if the prevention spending had not occurred. How easy is it to measure long-term savings from preventing unhappiness, instability, rage, mental health problems or loneliness?
Caution is also needed because understanding the value of prevention doesn’t mean we know how to achieve it. For example, we know that if more adults took exercise, we could save the NHS millions of pounds. But despite many programmes, there has been little improvement in the proportion of adults taking exercise. Is this because the analysis of the problems was wrong? Or because the initiatives were ill-conceived? Or didn’t reach the right people? Or just that changing adult behaviour is difficult and requires a combination of interventions that we haven’t yet arrived at? The complexities are too great to answer these questions without a lot of extra work and trial and error.
Nor do we always know exactly why things do work. Some ingredients of success, such as charismatic leadership, a learning approach, dedicated individuals and deep understanding, can be the hardest to ‘roll out’ and ‘scale up’.
The Community Budget pilots are exploring the potential for what Thomas Kuhn identified as a ‘paradigm shift’ in the 1960s. As he noted, even when evidence begins to mount up, it takes years for professional practice to change. At all levels of the system there are vested interests in the status quo: people who were trained in the current system, whose careers depend on the continuity of current processes, who are so used to looking at problems in a certain way that they discount evidence of better approaches. A paradigm shift is not simply about innovation, it’s about dismantling the way things are currently done.
For local government, these experiments are real. Councils and partners want to implement change and make things happen because they can no longer afford to do things in the old ways.
The danger is that for central government the pilots will remain simply experiments – and the proof is not deemed ‘sufficient’ to persuade Whitehall departments of the need for change. When money is scarce and political tempers are short, unorthodox approaches seem risky. It is in the nature of experiments that they fail. Often several attempts are required before they succeed. If Apple’s Steve Jobs had been required to provide advance proof of the effectiveness of his investment in R&D, it’s unlikely that the Mac, iPod and iPad would have been developed.
What is needed now is the confidence to take a leap into the unknown. These experiments offer an opportunity to create a safer and more structured environment to try new things – since they bring together key decision makers at the centre with those at locality level – and to create the sort of dialogue that might lead to a breakthrough. This will only happen with a joint spirit of endeavour – a willingness to challenge received assumptions, and the courage to try new things. Whatever else, the four pilots will be a fascinating experiment in whether behaviour at all levels of government can change.
Sue Goss is head of the local government practice at the independent Office for Public Management. She has also supported the South of Tyne Total Place pilot and organised a simulation of a whole-place community budget pilot www.opm.co.uk
