Proceed until apprehended

One message is clear from last week’s joint CLG/Treasury report into the lessons from the Total Place pilots and the next stages – that ministers and mandarins have taken it on board, and the concept is here to stay.

Indeed, Lord Bichard told an LGA conference this week that more had been achieved on the subject in the last 11 months than the last 11 years.

But that was the easy bit. The pilots and others were helpful in identifying clear weaknesses in the structure of provision, but none of these came as a huge surprise. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of public sector bureaucracies already knows they overlap, are often inefficient, and are poor at dealing with problems involving multi-agency responses.

The real challenge is actually doing something about it. The CLG/Treasury response, while laying out a ‘road map’ for Total Place, also contains the usual Whitehall tendencies.

Apart from imposing on us yet more meaningless catch-phrases, such as ‘the single offer,’ ‘the innovative policy offer’, and ‘total capital and asset pathfinders’, it is unable to resist laying down more hoops for councils to jump through.

The single offer smacks of the so-called freedoms offered to top CPA performers years back – haven’t we moved on since then? Offers of slightly reduced indicators and less ring-fencing are doubtless designed to elicit more forelock-touching from grateful councils. And Total Place will not work if it depends on sweeteners from Whitehall and will merely perpetuate local government’s tendency to wait and be told what to do by the centre.

And there’s the rub. It really is up to councils to pick up the baton and run. The Leadership Centre’s MD, John Atkinson, told the LGA’s event this week that they should ‘proceed until apprehended’, a version of ‘do whatever you want unless it is expressly forbidden.’

But will councils respond in similar vein? Or will cultural barriers, timidity, lack of ambition and lack of confidence mean the opportunity to reconfigure services more efficiently around the need of users just passes them by?

How they react during the crucial next eight months, as preparations are made for the 2011 spending review, will be the test.