By Richard Johnstone | 27 February 2012
MPs will examine the government’s Community Budget plans in detail next year, they said today.
In a report on their findings so far, members of the Commons communities and local government select committee posed several questions on the scheme. These include the use of Community Budgets for families with complex needs, the recent announcement of schemes to pool all government spending in a locality and what information should be provided to ensure that spending remains accountable to Parliament.
Community Budgets pool funds from various government sources to allow councils and other public services to work together to focus services on specific needs. The aim also to reduce duplication and waste.
The ‘troubled families’ pilots, which started in April 2012, are part of the government’s £450m programme to turn around the lives of 120,000 families in England by 2015.
As these are at an early stage, the committee’s ‘first phase’ Taking forward Community Budgets report took evidence on the main areas for further investigation.
It highlighted questions around how public money will be monitored when public sector organisations are working together. For example, the report asked whether there should be a single finance officer with responsibility across agencies, or a group of officers.
The committee’s full investigation will also examine to what extent central government is using Community Budgets as a vehicle to achieve the 120,000 families target, which has been set centrally.
Four ‘whole place’ Community Budget pilots have also been selected by The Department for Communities and Local Government
Sources of central government cash are to be merged into a single pot for local public services, and work on the pilots has already begun. Implementation is expected around the end of the year.
Or these pilots, the committee will examine how ‘relationships and communications between Whitehall and localities [can] be further strengthened’.
It will also investigate how, if the pilots lead to better working, this can be reproduced elsewhere.
Committee chair Clive Betts said Community Budgets were ‘an important government initiative with the potential to bring significant benefits and also to transform the manner in which services are managed and provided’.
He added that the committee had ‘put down a marker’ about its plans to sruitinise the proposals.
He said: ‘[The report] sets out the purpose of the policy as well as issues that both central and local government will have to address to take forward Community Budgets.’
