Community Budgets were introduced in October 2010 as part of the Spending Review with the aim of bringing different national and local funding streams together into a single local funding pot and, by doing so enabling various different local agencies, local authorities included, “to redesign services around the needs of citizens, improving outcomes, reducing duplication and waste and so saving significant sums of public money”. The concept underpinning Community Budgets initially tested through 16 pilots tackling social problems around families with complex needs, built on the previous Government’s work on Local Area Agreements (LAAs) and Total Place. Subsequently, last July local authority chief executives were told that DCLG wanted to roll out Community Budgets for families with multiple problems to about 50 areas by April 2012.

It is difficult to argue against the basic idea of Community Budgets (and Total Place before it). It makes no sense for local agencies to spend lots of small sums of money on similar people, or indeed places, when they can be combined to create much more joined up and efficient services. Equally, if you had a blank sheet of paper you wouldn’t design the current architecture of local public services in the way it is currently configured.