By Richard Johnstone | 1 July 2014
Long-term public spending plans are needed to help integrate local service provision, a senior figure involved in implementing the coalition’s flagship Community Budgets programme has said.
Robert Pollock, director of the Public Service Transformation Network, which works to design services around the needs of local people, said multi-year spending deals could ‘de-risk’ the implementation of plans to cut costs and improve provision.
Last year’s Autumn Statement included a Treasury pledge to work with departments ‘to give local public services the same long-term indicative budgets as departments from the next Spending Review’.
Speaking to Public Finance, Pollock said implementation of this was one of the ways government could incentivise different local services to collaborate on reforms.
‘Some of the places we’ve worked have said it’s a bit of a barrier that we don’t have a long-term funding arrangement,’ he said.
The network has worked with the four original ‘whole place’ Community Budget pilots – Essex, Greater Manchester, Cheshire West and Chester, and the London tri-borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster – as well as nine additional areas that joined the network last July.
‘If the Treasury could work up indicative longer-term budgets, I think what it does is de-risk some of the partnership working,’ Pollock said.
‘Finance directors locally will have a clearer sense of what their future allocation is going to be, and can then start to think about how they’re using their mainline budgets for this kind of partnership working.
‘Some of the feedback from whole place was that, while it wasn’t a limiting factor, the lack of long-term funding certainty and alignment between local government and health made it more difficult to do.’
Pollock told PF the network had a target to have made £250m worth of savings, either delivered or in future spending baselines, by the end of the current financial year.
By that time, the four whole-place areas will have had more than a year of implementing their plans, while the nine transformation areas will have begun to do so from the autumn.
‘That’s our ambition by the end of the current financial year,’ Pollock said. ‘We will assess all the evidence, quality assure it, and that’s our target, so that we can be held to account for the contribution we’re making.’
