By David Williams
13 November 2009
The shadow communities secretary has given enthusiastic backing to the local government collaboration programme, predicting it will ‘eclipse’ previous partnership schemes.
Caroline Spelman told a New Local Government Network seminar that Total Place, currently being trialled in 13 local authority areas, will render irrelevant current schemes to encourage collaboration on a local level.
‘This has been tried before – we had Local Area Agreements, which were designed to get the budget holders round the table,’ she said. ‘We had the Sustainable Communities Act. Now we have Total Place. Why will this succeed where other efforts have failed? It’s because the Treasury is behind it.’
Spelman told the November 9 session how the Department for Communities and Local Government had previously been unable to influence the decision-making of other parts of Whitehall, such as the Department of Health. ‘It was very hard for the local authority representatives to make a decision on a horizontal level when the line management in those departments was almost entirely vertical. [But] with the Treasury behind it, you open up the possibility of doing things differently and that is very exciting.
‘LAAs are about to be eclipsed by what Total Place has to offer,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame it is coming so late in this parliamentary cycle.’
However, she said, now was not the right time to completely rethink local government finance. Challenged on council tax, Spelman said all systems had strengths and weaknesses, and the priority was to give councils more control over local spending.
She also outlined proposals to give councils more security of income while bolstering local economies by allowing them to keep the proceeds of business rate growth for six years.
13 November 2009
The shadow communities secretary has given enthusiastic backing to the local government collaboration programme, predicting it will ‘eclipse’ previous partnership schemes.
Caroline Spelman told a New Local Government Network seminar that Total Place, currently being trialled in 13 local authority areas, will render irrelevant current schemes to encourage collaboration on a local level.
‘This has been tried before – we had Local Area Agreements, which were designed to get the budget holders round the table,’ she said. ‘We had the Sustainable Communities Act. Now we have Total Place. Why will this succeed where other efforts have failed? It’s because the Treasury is behind it.’
Spelman told the November 9 session how the Department for Communities and Local Government had previously been unable to influence the decision-making of other parts of Whitehall, such as the Department of Health. ‘It was very hard for the local authority representatives to make a decision on a horizontal level when the line management in those departments was almost entirely vertical. [But] with the Treasury behind it, you open up the possibility of doing things differently and that is very exciting.
‘LAAs are about to be eclipsed by what Total Place has to offer,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame it is coming so late in this parliamentary cycle.’
However, she said, now was not the right time to completely rethink local government finance. Challenged on council tax, Spelman said all systems had strengths and weaknesses, and the priority was to give councils more control over local spending.
She also outlined proposals to give councils more security of income while bolstering local economies by allowing them to keep the proceeds of business rate growth for six years.
