PM: Total Place savings ''not unrealistic''

Friday, March 12, 2010

The adoption of Total Place across the whole country could lead to budgetary savings of 15 per cent in the public sector, according to the Prime Minister, writes Dean Carroll.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report, commissioned by London Councils, found that £11bn of the £73.6bn spent on services in the capital in 2009 was a waste of money – due to duplication and bureaucracy. The study – informed by the Total Place work – found that "overcrowding of agencies can lead to confusion in delivery while different national goals often can conflict with each other".

Asked if Total Place could deliver 15 per cent savings everywhere – in his fifth appearance before the Commons Liaison Committee – Brown said: "It has a great deal of scope to yield these savings and I think that 15 per cent is probably not unrealistic."

He added: "We will have to look at the way that the different projects that are part of Total Place work and then judge whether we can apply this more widely.

"In some cases, buildings are being duplicated and you could actually rationalise that. In other cases, there is an overlap in terms of HR or IT – where you can consolidate. These are the things that we can do at a local level – we are very interested in the results that the Total Place experiment is providing for us.

"I have been at a number of meetings where we have discussed how this project can work and it was something that we wanted to do for some time. You have got to persuade all the agencies to come together."

It was the strongest hint yet of how seriously Total Place is being taken at the heart of government. Results from the 13 pilot studies are due to feed into the Chancellor's Budget. Local Government Secretary John Denham also revealed that initial analysis of the Total Place data had suggested that £20bn – or 5-6 per cent of organisational budgets – could be saved over the next 10 years through better asset management alone.

Meanwhile, the Conservative leadership has also indicated that it would retain Total Place if the party wins power. Public Servant revealed last month that Conservative Party deputy chairman Bob Neill wanted to see Total Place extended across the whole of local government and, possibly, even to Whitehall and private sector service providers.