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Whatever happened to Community Budgets? Where did it all go wrong? From the great white public service hope that began life as Total Place, the policy seems to have shrivelled down to a single issue project in a handful of authorities, without a champion to be had in central government. Somewhere along the line, Whitehall seems to have lost interest. The DCLG's response to the CLG select committee on Community Budgets feels lacklustre at best, claiming councils already have flexibility and there is no need for any more. It sounds decidedly familiar. Didn't the department say last week that local government had already been given a wee bit of financial freedom so there was no need for any more? It sounds like the DCLG has decided it has done quite enough for one parliamentary session and plans to sit down with a nice cup of tea for the next year – no biscuits, obviously. The Public Service Transformation Network may be good news but, as Clive Betts says, does it really have the clout to call government departments to account if they don't play ball with Community Budgets? The bigger question is to ask is, does the DCLG? As we have tottered from one place-based budgetary pilot to the next over the past few years, it is now time to just get this done. Local government should be pushing hard on the door of Whitehall. But this is not something that can be done locally. I'm rarely an advocate for centralism, but this has to be driven through all Whitehall departments so it will need to come from the very top down. Neither have I ever been a supporter of local government calls to scrap the DCLG, but unless the department can start to deliver on this, you have to ask, what is the point? Increasingly it is becoming a department of housing and finance settlements – is that enough to warrant a separate ministry? Sir Richard Leese's call for a department of public services looks like an increasingly attractive alternative.

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What is the point of DCLG?

By Heather Jameson | 01 February 2014

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