With every budget there is the chance of déjà vu: a certain feeling of ‘haven't I seen this idea somewhere before?' So it was with this year's autumn Budget, which included mention of five pilots for mayoral strategic authorities (MSAs) to test place-based budgets, with the aim of getting them under way in the new year. That's familiar! Haven't we been here before?
First, there was Total Place in 2009. Then, there were at least two decades of successor initiatives that all tried, in one way or another, to look across the whole spend in a place and use it more intelligently.
