The silo mentality remains an issue

In hindsight, the last 10 days’ uproar over council cuts to the voluntary sector and the threat to Big Society may be seen as the time when Number 10 fell out of love with localism.
It will have dawned on the prime minister and his advisers in the past fortnight that once you start ring-fencing specific major services from cuts, such as schools and health, then you must either ring-fence all the remaining services or expect them to disappear as councils struggle to reduce budgets by one-quarter in two years.
One can imagine David Cameron charging about Number 10 wanting to know why Sure Start centres face the chop or community projects are axed, and why their funds were not also ring-fenced and how come no-one warned him?
The frustration was evident in his Big Society comeback speech on Monday. During questions, Mr Cameron, whose knowledge of local government appears to be based on his constituency district of West Oxfordshire – which he praised for not cutting grants to the local Citizens’ Advice Bureau – remarked: ‘Not all local authorities are behaving in the same way.
‘This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. I cannot order every local authority what to do with their budget.’
He could, of course, as other governments have done, but he will not, because the problem is less lack of ring-fencing than lack of funding per se.
Instead, he would be better advised to look at the other end of the telescope, namely Whitehall. As the Total Place pilots found, and as their successors, the 16 community budget pilots will find, there is still too much waste and duplication caused by the silo mentality of Whitehall departments and their reluctance to share budgets locally.
The Government has been curiously reluctant to grasp this nettle, although decentralisation minister, Greg Clark, is certainly rattling cages.
Rather than being frustrated at the impact of council cuts, the prime minister should call Mr Clark in to Number 10, add ‘community budgets minister’ to his brief, and order him to make the pooling of all public sector budgets at local level the coalition’s number one priority.