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Last year Cllr Colin Barrow, leader of Westminster City Council, set the council and its partners a challenge – if we knew how much we collectively spent in Westminster could we find ways of maximising the value of that spend? For Westminster, the public spending audit, which has developed from that initial challenge, is a key element of our unified public services programme. By tracking the money we can see clearly for the first time how our priority outcomes are currently resourced by the public sector – and where the opportunities are both to critically evaluate our activities and to move to joint or partnership commissioning. An example that is especially relevant at the moment is unemployment. Despite the substantial work already being undertaken by many councils (for Westminster through our ‘City Recovery' programme), there are limits to our ability locally to counteract a global recession. But we can help the growing numbers of unemployed local residents. Clearer and more effective pathways to training and support are critical in returning people to work. Those pathways can only be improved if first of all the funding being spent by the local authority, the Department for Work and Pensions, Job Centre Plus and the regional development agency is understood. Having achieved that in Westminster, the council and its partners have now put in place a shared strategic approach to commissioning services enabling us to ensure that we fill the gaps in the Government's core offer. Our aim is not only to develop a common understanding of total public spend but to clearly link that to the ‘outcome chain' - what we do to achieve our outcomes. We then use a commissioning approach through which the resources can be pooled, aligned or re-allocated to deliver services which achieve our priority outcomes,in the most efficient way. Westminster's version of the total place approach was a detailed spending audit involving organizations where there is local influence over spending, including the Metropolitan Police, NHS Westminster and housing associations. Working directly with our partners to understand their budgets was not always easy. But the trust our strong partnership working has built up over recent years was very important. For this reason we focused on 22 key partners in the public sector. As we looked beyond the headline figures, something we were determined to do, the complexity of different national priorities and funding regimes, came into stark contrast. The council was able to map its spending right down to ward level but this was not possible for most of our partners. Not sharing the same boundaries and regional allocations proved a challenge. A knotty issue for Westminster, located in the heart of the capital, has been the identification of spending on non-residents and how that should be treated. Having worked through the process with our major partners we now intend to expand the audit's scope to other public organisations such as English Heritage and the British Transport Police. In headline terms our audit has shown that more than £1.6 billion is spent by public bodies delivering key services in the city. A figure of £150 million is spent on benefi t payments alone to residents every year. Figures like this made the business case for unified public services. Mike More is chief executive of Westminster City Council

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ECONOMIC GROWTH

Mapping our spending

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