Community budget partners unwilling to give up controls, MPs hear

21 Dec 10
Place-based budgeting is being hampered by an unwillingness across government to give up power and money, MPs have been told.
By Lucy Phillips


21 December 2010

Place-based budgeting is being hampered by an unwillingness across government to give up power and money, MPs have been told.

The Commons communities and local government select committee questioned witnesses yesterday on a series of issues around localism and accountability, including the move towards community budgets, the coalition’s reincarnation of Total Place.  

Eugene Sullivan, chief executive of the Audit Commission, told MPs that partner organisations including Whitehall departments and local agencies have been reluctant to give up control over their budgets. He said: ‘People are not happy at giving up their budgets and even more so in a time of cuts. It’s going to be very difficult to get partnerships to come to the table on total budgeting.’


But he conceded that if the willingness was there, pooled budgets need not be a barrier to accountability and scrutiny.


It was announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review that 16 areas, covering 28 councils and their partner organisations, would pilot Community Budgets from April next year. The previous government had set up 13 Total Place pilot projects, which identified significant potential savings through joining up public budgets locally.


Jessica Crowe, executive director of the Centre for Public Scrutiny, said the Total Place pilots had given a ‘powerful message’ that ‘we would all save money’. But she said: ‘It is clearly something that has to be done but it is extensively more challenging at the moment.’


Crowe added that there were ‘lessons to avoid’, with CPS analysis showing partnerships had not always been open or transparent and people were ‘not willing to give up their control and local empires’. She called for ‘clear governance mechanisms’ to be put in place, claiming that no-one had thought of this prior to last year’s pilots.


CIPFA chief executive Steve Freer, also giving evidence, called for a new mindset when it came to pilot schemes. ‘Rather that seeing this as something we want to see working in a few areas then roll out across the piece, I think we should expect these pilots to show us some of the positive aspects but also to expose more fully some of the problems.’


He said he expected this to ‘take us to a position where we have to simplify the architecture and improve the structure of our public services and have fewer agencies responsible for delivery of public services’.


The witnesses were also quizzed about the government’s new transparency drive in which Whitehall departments and local authorities are required to publish online all spending of £500 or over.

They agreed the move had ‘potential’ but said more information and context was needed to help so called ‘armchair auditors’ judge what the outcomes of the spending had been and whether it was value for money.

Freer said: ‘The challenge is to start to move from raw data to something more informative... that allows you to form a judgement as to whether your local services are quite as good as they should be. I hope that is the direction we will move in, in the period ahead.’

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