Councils should get on with their own community budget plans despite the pilots

The LGA and its leaders are right to criticise the modest ambitions of the next round of cxommunity budget pilots, that is, the two for neighbourhoods and the two for a single pot in a whole place. When they were first announced at the LGA conference in June by Nick Clegg I made that point myself to one of the DCLG ministers, Greg Clark, and was given the impression that there would in time be more to come and that these pilots were merely the start of the process.
What puzzles me is that I have yet to meet anyone from across the political spectrum who disagrees with the principles behind expanding the community budgets programme. Eric Pickles is now an enthusiastic convert and - as he told The MJ last month in an interview at an LGA conference on community budgets - is keen to 'smash down the silos' between government departments both nationally and locally. So if no one disagrees with the concept, then why not make the next stage of community budgets much more ambitious than merely announcing four pilots?
The answer has to be that Whitehall itself is concerned at the prospect of seeing departmental, silo-based budgets morphed into single pots, thereby blurring its own accountability lines even though Mr Pickles told councils at the conference to 'make Whitehall an offer.'
Okay, then councils should take him up on it. Forget the modest number of pilots and the DCLG form-filling required to apply to be one. Why can't a council simply set up its own shadow whole place, single pot budget along with its local partners and present the findings to Mr Pickles? Don't wait for guidance or pilots - just get on with it anyway.