Community Budgets to be extended

29 Jun 11
The government today announced that Community Budgets for helping ‘problem families’ are to be rolled out across 110 new areas over the next two years.
By Richard Johnstone in Birmingham | 29 June 2011


The government today announced that Community Budgets for helping ‘problem families’ are to be rolled out across 110 new areas over the next two years.

The announcement, made by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the Local Government Association's annual conference in Birmingham today, follows the success of 16 pilots.

Under Community Budgets, various different sources of funding are merged into a single 'local bank account'. The current pilots are pooling money for tackling social problems around families with complex needs.

But decentralisation minister Greg Clark told the conference this morning that the government would bring forward ‘Localism 2.0'. This would include the right for councils to put forward plans for their own Community Budgets by the end of the current Parliament and ‘expect government to do a deal’.

He said that this would mean that plans would be developed locally for the pooling of both central and local government budgets. ‘What’s right for Birmingham might be different for Burnley or Blackpool,‘ he said. This would be part of a ‘new constitutional settlement between central and local government’.

Clegg also told the conference that there would also be four new pilots of Community Budget schemes. Two areas will be selected to develop budgets at a neighbourhood level, giving residents the opportunity to say what services they want, how they should work and whether they want to run them.

Two further councils will be selected to pilot a plan for all spending on local public services to be merged into a single budget to be used on local priorities.

More information will be provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government at the end of the summer, but Clegg said the pilots would be ‘budgeting for real life, breaking down the barriers between different parts of the machine’.

The LGA said that the announcement of the new schemes shows ‘momentum is building’ behind approaches that give local areas greater control over the provision of services.

LGA chair Sir Merrick Cockell said: ‘We do need much greater buy-in from all government departments if the next round of councils are to more easily overcome some of the hurdles which stand in the way of the huge savings and greater local accountability this approach can deliver. We estimate up to £100bn in taxpayers’ money could be saved over the life of the current Parliament if place-based budgets were introduced everywhere.’

He added that the single budget pilots were ‘an important step toward unlocking the savings and improvements to services which can be achieved by devolving greater control to local areas’.

‘We are hopeful that this is yet another signal that Community Budgets will be a major feature of the way places provide services in the future.’

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