Total efficiency?

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Jacobs Executive Director Chris Wilson investigates whether Total Place is the best hope for improving delivery of public agency services at local level

Vast amounts of money flow around any given place in England: from local to national via taxation, from national to local via benefits and pensions, to and through local agencies in numerous funding streams. How much money is going into a place? How effective is this spending in achieving what we want on the ground? Could we get more from the public pound if its spending was differently organised and directed? These questions are taken from the introduction to 'Counting Cumbria', part of the 'Calling Cumbria' project that preceded the government's Total Place programme, launched in April 2009.

Total Place aims to identify how local public agencies can better work together to deliver frontline services more efficiently and improve the quality of life for their communities. It analyses how public money from national, regional and local public sectors comes together in one place and how local, public, private and voluntary organisations could work together more effectively on a wide range of issues from worklessness to climate change.

Key issues that Total Place addresses include:
• How well do public sector agencies work together in prioritising and making spending decisions?
• How can they spend the overall total more efficiently?
• How do they work together to minimise duplication and maximise impact?
• What national expenditure could be controlled locally?
• Which government departments do local bodies have the best and most frequent engagement with?
• How well does public spending support the community strategy?
• Where there are a large number of bodies involved with economic development, are they properly aligned?
• Where several bodies maintain separate front offices serving the public, could they be integrated to provide a one-stop-shop, like the Kent Gateways model?

Community leaders are passionate about the success of Total Place. There appears to be a consensus that, whichever party is in government by late summer 2010, the agenda set out under Total Place is so compelling that it will continue. With 13 pilots in place, it is widely seen as the best hope of achieving a step change in efficiency at the local level. But its implementation is far from straightforward as, if it is to make a significant impact, it calls for a major transformation in the way public sector agencies with differing governance structures, budgetary cycles, and planning priorities work together towards a converging and common agenda.

It also creates potential tensions as the pursuit of ever greater efficiencies could result, for example, in shared service operations that are so large they lose the element of local accountability. Any potential impact on employment in the area will bring political and economic consequences, and moves to consolidate strategic decision-making in a city or county may run counter to the prevailing drive to push decision-making down to the grassroots community level.

Total Place offers a very significant step on the road to achieving much greater efficiencies in the provision of local services. Its 13 pilot areas are each exploring one or more aspects of providing improved services in a more integrated way.