EXCLUSIVE: Total Place – making it happen from the centre

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Extensive long-term reform to how citizens receive their services is absolutely essential and Total Place is the key, writes Nigel Keohane, head of research at the New Local Government Network

The Budget marks a fruitful association between the Total Place initiative and the Treasury. The lead from the Treasury is positive because, at the moment more than ever, money really matters; it is also good because it suggests awareness within the heart of government that local solutions should provide an answer to the future shape of public services.

However, at the same time, new research from NLGN concludes that the Treasury should focus not only on the immediate accounting and financial benefits but also on the prospect of wider long-term reform to service delivery needed.

To take forward the key lessons from the pilots, national politicians must be ready to grapple with the complex and major changes that Total Place throws up. At the moment, there seems to be something for everyone in Total Place. Even the Prime Minister has argued that 15 per cent savings from Total Place "is probably not unrealistic".

National politicians are presenting unusual harmony on the case for Total Place. All three main parties have welcomed the publication and transparency of spending by public bodies in an area. There has also been much agreement on the case for driving efficiencies through shared appointments across local public services and driving efficiencies by sharing specific functions. For instance, the Conservative Party has expressed enthusiasm for more areas establishing Directors of Public Health as a means to save money and join up local agencies.

This apparent political unanimity may mask differences of interpretation. In its 'Smarter Government' White Paper, the government set Total Place out as a further iteration and exposition of its public service reform agenda. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party may prefer to use the light shone on public sector approaches through Total Place to highlight multiple layers of government and, what Bob Neill has referred to as, the "insidious nature of the quangocracy that has grown up in the UK".

However, the real question that has emerged from NLGN research is whether national government – of any colour – will be bold enough to take the difficult decisions to allow a much wider reappraisal of the way that public services are constructed and delivered.

Reform needs to take place not just in localities but also within the centre. Currently, democratically-elected representatives control only a fraction of the public resources spent in an area. Looking afresh at the services that citizens receive demonstrates just how disjointed they are, leading to inconvenience and inefficiency and hindering more innovative responses to the challenges faced by society.

For instance, many areas are now looking at how they could prevent major problems in health, crime and unemployment through supporting people more proactively at an earlier stage. However, the fractured nature of service budgets means that public bodies may not feel the reward of their investment or may be unable to access existing budgets held elsewhere in the system.

Meanwhile, multiple funding routes and departmental accounting and performance monitoring create their own inefficiencies. But, they are indicative of a wider problem: namely, decisions and money held too far from the citizen; a reliance on vertical departmental funding, reporting, accountability, initiatives and programmes; and lack of discretion at the local level.

Radical reform within Whitehall is therefore necessary to counteract these forces and drive collaboration and devolution. NLGN proposes that the centre and the local area should come to a 'Place Proposition Agreement' which would delegate specific budgets and responsibilities down to the locality.

The report also advocates a remodelling of Whitehall itself to encourage devolution and drive more joined-up vision across different departments. NLGN's proposed 'Department for Devolved Government' would merge the Cabinet Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the offices for Scotland and Wales. In so doing, it would ensure both that Whitehall thinks as one and that control can be pushed down to communities.

If we made these reforms then we would achieve not only financial efficiencies but also radical reform to the way that citizens receive their services.

'Greater than the sum of its parts: Total Place and the future shape of public services' by Nigel Keohane and Geraldine Smith was published by NLGN on 18 March 2010. Please visit www.nlgn.org.uk to access the research.