In cookery, chefs combine ingredients to make their dishes more tasty and nutritious; but most local services are consumed individually. Adam Branson tastes the stew being cooked up by the Community Budgets project
In local government, the problem isn’t too many cooks: it’s the fact that each is working to a different recipe. Local services will always be provided by a wide range of organisations – but as things stand, each follows a rulebook written by a different set of national bodies, constraining their ability to collaborate. A combination of Treasury spending rules, services’ statutory responsibilities, mandatory central policies, discreet vertical reporting lines, and diverse organisational structures mean that many local services providers don’t face down to communities or across to each other, but up to national government.
For Whitehall, the advantages of this approach are tight central control over delivery methods, spending and performance metrics, and clear lines of accountability through accounting officers and ministers. But there’s a cost to be paid, in the shape of local inefficiencies: without strong drivers of coordination across local providers, there are both high levels of waste and bureaucracy, and gaps and overlaps in the services provided to individuals. Users experience services separately; but what if service providers could pool their resources, in order to align their work and address service users’ needs in the round?
The Whole Place Community Budget (WPCB) initiative allows local government to do just that, encouraging agencies to join up their work and, ultimately, to integrate budgets lines. The idea has been stewing in Whitehall for some time, but its first four projects have just moved from pilot stage to live delivery. CSW has analysed them to see whether the time for joined-up budgets hs finally come, and what the barriers might be to extending the idea nationally.
Out of the frying pan
In March last year, local government minister Brandon Lewis announced the creation of a ‘Transformation Network’ which, he said, would help distribute lessons learned from WPCB across the country. The network – run by about 30 people, based in London and Manchester – is made up of experts on secondment from six central government departments, the Local Government Association and three councils, and retains much of the expertise built up in the pilots.
Community budgets got another boost in June’s spending review. The government announced that nine new places had been chosen to work with the Transformation Network, and the creation of a £100m Transformation Fund. This builds on a previously announced £7m pot, and is aimed at areas looking to integrate services in a similar way to the WPCB pilots.
The Spending Review made it clear that the WPCB initiative is gaining influence in Whitehall. Perhaps most prominently, the government announced the creation of the Better Care Fund: a £3.8bn pot designed to support the integration of local health and social care services. In addition, the chancellor announced a £200m extension to the Troubled Families programme, set up along WPCB lines, as well as £30m for fire and rescue collaboration, and £50m for police collaboration with other forces and councils.
October saw another burst of activity: the recipients of the original £7m Transformation Fund were announced, and new flexibilities were introduced to allow councils to use £200m of capital receipts from asset sales for one-off service reform costs in 2015-16 and 2016-17. Perhaps most significantly, that month also saw the four WPCB pilots move from theory to practice, with the first projects going live (see boxes).
Cooking up a storm
So the direction of travel is clear, but there are still significant hurdles to overcome. Perhaps most notably, none of the four pilots have as yet pooled their budgets – a key aim of the scheme. They are sharing staff and have set up integrated management systems, but the money has yet to follow.
“I think that the pooled budgets element is fundamentally important,” says Neil McInroy, chief executive of think tank the Centre for Local Economic Strategies and the author of a report for charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on how community budgets could be used to alleviate poverty. “How do you force collaboration without people having an equal stake in the resources that are there?”
Then there is an issue around data sharing. If different public and voluntary sector bodies are to work collaboratively, they need to have access to the data each partner holds about a particular client. However, several of the pilots have raised concerns over data protection. Indeed, the DCLG select committee investigated the community budgets programme towards the end of last year and highlighted data protection fears as a key barrier, stating: “There is a culture in central and local government that is averse to sharing data, which in part may be derived from existing data protection legislation or perceptions about the legislation. This culture must not be allowed to obstruct the sharing of information needed for the development and operation of community budgets.”
The government responded to the committee’s report at the end of January, stating that “the Cabinet Office is exploring options for legislation to remove potential barriers to information sharing”. This, however, fails to impress committee chairman and veteran Labour MP Clive Betts, who is otherwise a strong supporter of community budgets. “Data sharing may be a perceived problem in some cases, but a real problem in others,” he says. “What is the Cabinet Office doing to look at legal constraints? They must be doing something – but what is it?”
Of course, if the WPCB concept is to be rolled out across the country, it will require the enthusiastic support of all local authorities and their partners – and the experience of getting this far has left some councils wary. “Everyone is scarred and influenced by the past experience of working with government,” says Transformation Network member and Treasury secondee Peter Wilding. He adds that a new model will be required in order to expand the scheme. “The pilots were very much about dropping Whitehall secondees into teams to establish the business cases,” he says. “The network can’t operate in exactly the same way. If we’re going to work with a lot more places, it isn’t feasible.” Joanne Fearn, a secondee to the network from the Cabinet Office, says: “Part of our work is to draw down expertise from a much wider set of partners.”
So, how quickly can we expect to see community budget-style initiatives rolled out across the country? Betts is sceptical. “There are good intentions, but I still don’t think that there is a clear plan for where we’re going to be in five years’ time,” he says.
Others argue that ongoing spending cuts will make the potential savings ever more attractive. “It takes time to transform services,” says Tamara Finkelstein, director of public services at the Treasury. “[But] with the need to take out more money, things could well accelerate. There’s the Better Care Fund, the Troubled Families initiative… these are going to be demonstrator projects. They’re big ones that help people see whether that way of working helps; whether you get better outcomes for less money.”
The WPCB programme is a stew, not a single ingredient; and like a stew, it will take time to cook. Cooling blasts from technical and legal issues surrounding data and budget sharing have slowed progress. Questions remain over how this dish will be served up nationally, and how much will be thrown into the pot. But its flavour seems to appeal to those tasting it – both at the local, and at the national level.