Policy Tracker

Total Place: the testing ground for joined-up government

By Dion Watts

Total Place is a Government-funded initiative that looks at how a ‘whole area’ approach to public services can lead to better provison at a lower cost. It seeks to identify and avoid overlap and duplication between organisations – delivering a step change in both service improvement and efficiency at the local level, as well as across Whitehall.

Total Place was inspired by the ‘Counting Cumbria’ report, which involved mapping all public money spent in the locality and looking at where services might be delivered more efficiently. The practice is not new among local authorities, but the initiative now has the backing of government departments including, crucially, the Treasury.

Pilots

There are 13 pilot areas participating in the scheme, each area ensuring a diverse mix of economic, geographical and demographic profiles. These pilots have a real opportunity to rip up the text book and redesign the way public services are planned and delivered.

The pilots submitted their final reports this month, but concerns arose in the run up that the programme could be "strangled at birth” if the Treasury uses aspirations from them to calculate budget cuts, particularly after a report commissioned by London Councils identified £11bn in potential savings that could be found in the capital alone.

Feedback from the pilots in Bradford, South Tyneside, Gateshead and Sunderland, Birmingham, Luton and Central Bedfordshire are contained here.

The pilot in Central Bedfordshire and Luton focused on criminal justice services, finding that just 2 per cent of offenders cause nearly 30 per cent of all crime locally, and it costs about £500,000 a year for each persistent and prolific offender.

The pilot in Kent focused on access to benefits, estimating that a third of the current total cost of administering an unemployment claim could be saved by simplifying the system.

The Leicestershire pilot focused on drug and alcohol abuse, and the Leicester City Council found that it spent 4.9m on alcohol interventions and 13.4m on combating drug misuse, even though alcohol was a larger cause of crime in the city. The study also found that every £1 invested in drug treatment saves £9.50 in other costs down the line.

Birmingham

Birmingham selected six themes for its pilot, including young people leaving care and drug and alcohol abuse. Birmingham City Council found children in care - who make up 2 per cent of the city’s child population - cost £35m a year while each of Birmingham’s 6,400 crack addicts costs £833,000 in wider “social costs” over their lifetime.

Worst of all, the way central government funds local agencies provides a disincentive to better collaboration. Although investment in early intervention for children and families saves £10 overall for every £1 spent, the council takes only a quarter of this – making it far less attractive than it should be.

The agencies are now vowing to adopt an attitude of collective responsibility for the city, and to develop a ‘budget for Birmingham’, co-ordinating their strategies to tackle stubborn underlying issues at the heart of the city’s social problems. But it says there are other barriers – for example, rules on data protection that discourage agencies from sharing information.

Birmingham City Council has since announced that it may cut up to 2,000 jobs in what is being touted as a foretaste of serious cuts to council budgets across the country. The crisis is understood to have been triggered by multi-million pound overspends in child protection and services for older people and adults with learning disabilities. The job losses are understood to be earmarked for areas such as adult social care, housing, libraries, sports centres, museums. Day centres and care homes for older people face closure.

Economies

Savings across local services of more than £20bn are reported to have been identified from the Total Place exercise. John Denham, the Communities Secretary, said that better management of assets alone could save £20bn over ten years. The test for Denham, or his successor, will be how much of the savings can be retained by local government, rather than the Treasury.

Total Place has the support of senior members of the Government. In his “Towards a New Politics” speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “Our Total Place reforms are potentially transformative in the better use of resources: they will allow local government and its partners to reach across all the funding coming into an area and enable better choices to be made at a local level about how this money is spent.”

The Tory view

The Conservatives, too, have indicated broad support for a ‘whole area’ approach to funding and delivery of public services. In a 2009 speech, the Shadow Communities Secretary, Caroline Spelman, gave the most explicit endorsement of the Total Place approach by a front-bench minister so far, when she said Local Area Agreements (LAAs) “will probably be eclipsed” by what it has to offer.

In early 2010, the Shadow Local Government Minister, Bob Neill, confirmed his Party’s support for Total Place’s localist principles in a speech at The MJ’s second Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) conference. However, in the same speech he also pledged to scrap CAA if elected, which would have implications for Total Place, as ministers are currently thought to be planning to integrate the two into an area-based value for money assessment of local services.

25 February 2010

Dion Watts. Local Government Research Consultant, Policy Review Intelligence