Think big on shared budgets

Eric Pickles regards it as ‘the future for public services.’ The DCLG secretary thinks local areas should ‘think big’, and it’s ‘time to let local areas grow up and do things their way.’
Mr Pickles was referring this week to the community budgets pilots which officially launch on Friday. For those of us who believe that innovation in local government did exist before last year’s general election, the community budgets concept has a familiar ring. It used to be called Total Place, which also had pilots, and, indeed, after the pilots reported their findings, a whole programme of action was outlined in detail in the March 2010 Budget, and then disappeared into Whitehall’s filing system.
The problem, of course, is that Total Place was so last year, or at least so last government, and therefore, dropped by the coalition. A few months later, the new ministers decided actually it was quite a good idea after all, and resurrected it, though the words Total Place were banned, and replaced by the much more clumsy-sounding community budgets.
Still, that’s politics, and while momentum was lost, the idea of joining up spending programmes locally still remains not only a very good idea but as Mr Pickles said, the future. There is still far too much time, energy and resources wasted on overlapping agencies, and the pilots are right to focus on problem families which suck in huge sums of public money, often with very little result.
Mr Pickles is also right to say local areas should do this themselves, and it is dispiriting to see how many of the original Total Place pilot areas have failed to follow the logic of their own conclusions, once the Government’s attentions turned elsewhere. We do not need endless, DCLG-inspired pilots. If they believe in them, councils should pursue community budgets/Total Place themselves.
However, it is also true that councils need the Government to order the relevant Whitehall departments to co-operate.
Total Place had commitment at Treasury and Cabinet level. Mr Pickles needs to ensure his Cabinet is now fully behind community budgets or, instead of being the future, they will become just another failed initiative.