Don't give up on Total Place

The coalition government is missing out on making real savings by rowing back on a radical pooling of budgets, says John Denham Communities secretary, Eric Pickles, has dashed the hopes of many local authorities that the new Government would take forward seriously Labour's work on Total Place. Despite announcing at last week's Conservative conference that local authorities would have the ability to pool budgets across services – the idea at the core of Total Place -– it swiftly became clear that two of the biggest budgets do not feature. Labour's original work with councils to establish Total Place covered, in principle, mainstream health spending, as well as key services such as police and probation. The March Budget and Labour's manifesto asked councils and public services to put forward proposals to pool funds free from central performance and financial control. A similar offer was available on a particular service area or theme, and alongside a multi-agency children and young people's grant. This pooled money was for youth activities, school improvement, support for families, disabled children, Sure Start and money for children and young people, as well as opportunities for pooling funding from PCT, police, and schools. The total budget for probation, police, education and health is more than £200bn. Not every pound of these budgets is, of course, spent locally or in practice would be pooled, but Mr Pickles's approach has excluded very significant areas of spending and, therefore, the opportunity to look at this money and enable it to work harder locally. The Total Place pilots showed that real savings could be made at the same time as improving the outcomes of public services, but this work depended on real co-ordination between difference agencies. In Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland, the cost of alcohol misuse to the public sector is around £143m, but Total Place showed that collaborative working, protecting frontline services, pooling resources, information and contracting, and multi-disciplinary approaches with a focus on prevention could secure efficiencies of £12m. Bradford found that re-offending rates for those on short sentences could be cut by 10% through introducing a more holistic care programme and reducing assessments and save £4m. Running costs for public assets in Lewisham are estimated at £65m to £100m but collaborative and more intelligent procurement and rationalising assets could achieve savings of £6.5m to £15m (10 to 15%). The work in Croydon, which focused on outcomes for children aged up to seven and their families, found that to deliver better outcomes, we must guard against boundaries and barriers and silo-based national delivery. With schools spending being fragmented across new academies and free schools, the PCTs – which played a big role in Total Place – being broken up and the police facing elected commissioners with their own agendas, many in local government will be hugely disappointed with Mr Pickles's announcement. And it means hard-pressed local taxpayers will be denied the prospect of all the efficiencies and improvements to local services. John Denham was shadow communities and local government secretary, and is now shadow business innovation and skills secretary

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Don't give up on Total Place

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