It was encouraging to hear Bob Neill, the new junior local government minister, tell the Local Leadership Centre’s Total Place Summit last week that he was enthusiastic for the idea and principles of Total Place. The strong and welcome indication was that Total Place would be fostered by the coalition government as it had been by the New Labour government.
This was what we might have expected given the pre-election statements by the then shadow ministers. They had been supportive of the principles that underpin Total Place in the same way that it had been embraced by Conservative councils, perhaps even more than by Labour-led authorities. Since that time, the new government’s more strident emphasis on reducing the public deficit would have suggested likely support and sympathy for any initiative or set of behaviours that could eliminate duplication, share assets and reduce costs – especially if also improving outcomes. Indeed, all the major political parties in England have championed ‘localism’ and pledged to support it in their manifestos and indeed in the post-election coalition agreement.
So why pose the question ‘can Total Place survive?’. The reason is that I genuinely believe that Total Place as a concept might either intentionally or unintentionally be eclipsed by a range of new policy initiatives. Total Place was predicated on the assumption that local government could (and would) lead collaborative activities across the public sector in its localities. Local agencies would align, pool or transfer to each other budgets to focus on achieving outcomes for local citizens and local communities. This would require primary care trusts , police, fire and rescue services, local authorities and other agencies to ‘up’ their partnership game. There would be a shift of resources to support interventions that led to prevention and long-term savings – some of which would not necessarily accrue to the organisations making the initial investment but which would have a wider benefit for localities and the people that live in them.
So where do we stand today? I remain confident that many political and managerial leaders across the public sector will continue to see this as the right way to provide some shield against future expenditure pressures. Looking ahead, however, it is a different matter.
Prima facie, we must face up to the fact that much of the new government’s wider localist agenda has the effect of possibly dismantling the architecture required for the kind of partnership working required to make a reality of the potential of Total Place – and therefore now much more challenging, if not in some cases, almost impossible to achieve.
In the NHS, PCTs (which are more often than not co-terminous with local authority boundaries and active players on bodies such as local strategic partnerships or in joint working with their local authority partners) will evolve, and their budgets and commissioning responsibilities will move to a fragmented set of independent general practice groups.
PCTs (with some directly elected members) will increasingly become voices for patients and communities and not strategic commissioners. This will cause tensions for local authorities, many of whom will feel that their democratic mandate is challenged – as well as now having also to deal with dozens of GP practices. General practitioners have many qualities but most have little experience of partnership working on a ‘whole community’ level, so this is going to be ‘interesting’.
Schools are to be encouraged to be more independent of local authorities, which in itself may be a good idea but which will potentially further distance education services from collective public service planning and delivery. Directly elected police commissioners will add their own new dynamic to existing local partnerships.
Local government will have to change the nature ans style of their place shaping and community leadership. These tasks will be more difficult but the prize no less vital.
The government understandably wishes to promote what could be a very exciting and innovative set of policies under the banner of the ‘Big Society’. These policies have the potential to unleash community energy and entrepreneurialism, and provide new opportunities for communities, households and individuals as well as civil society organisations. The concept of the ‘Big Society’ is not based on the foundation of state provision or state control at national or local level. Consequently, local authorities and their public sector partners will have to change their behaviours and approaches to the community sector. All of this will in turn add a further challenge to local partnership working.
Personalised and individual budgets, whilst positive policies in their own right, will also have implications with regard to the money and funds currently under the ‘control’ of major public sector agencies.
If Total Place were to be seen as solely a public sector initiative which was designed to support and protect the public sector, it would deserve not to survive. And if those who see Total Place and the behaviours and cultures that should underpin it, promote it as being only about ‘re-organising public sector deck chairs’, then it would have failed under the former government, let alone now that there is a government driven by the pursuit of a smaller state. Therefore, if Total Place is going to have any chance of survival, we may need to re-write its rule book. Actually, we should just ditch the rule book, and recognise that Total Place was best as a set of behaviours and not one or more processes. Instead, every locality will have to adapt and adopt its own approach.
So what should local government do now?
1) Local government can remain a key local leader with place shaping responsibilities. This provides them enormous opportunities and in particular for their politicians. But note that these opportunities will not and cannot be secured by any attempt to ‘control or command’ local communities or local people. Rather, it will require political leaders locally to cede power to communities, neighbourhoods and citizens; and to recognise that some power and finance will simply not even pass through their hands or bank accounts.
2) The Total Place pilots have demonstrated the potential for significant financial savings, capital receipts, improved customer experience and transformed service outcomes. It would be folly to lose the lessons and ideas that came from a year of real engagement between local agencies, and between local agencies and Whitehall. It would be ridiculous to miss the opportunities for financial savings that Total Place identified or to throw away the architecture to support this success.
3) Total Place was never going to realise its full potential unless Whitehall was ready and prepared to have consistent and complementary policies and regulations. Government should not abandon its dialogue with localities to facilitate the necessary Whitehall level changes.
The expenditure reductions that will be demanded by central government of all public sector agencies (the recent cuts being very small compared with those that are looming in the autumn and beyond) would benefit from a Total Place approach but not necessarily in the form that might have developed prior to the election. Local government and others should seek an urgent debate with the Government to agree the parameters. And this agreement will have to acknowledge and respect the government’s wider policy agenda in areas such as schools and the ‘Big Society’.
4) Experience in the 1980s when the budget pressures were much less than now should make all politicians and managers at national and local level wake up and ‘smell the coffee’. This is not the time for cost shunting or rows between local agencies depriving the community and third sectors of necessary funding; short term tactical cuts which have long-term adverse consequences; or for denying greater choice for citizens. Effective partnership working will be essential. Big strategic decisions need to be made – and made urgently.
So is Total Place dead? Not necessarily, and it is to be hoped that Bob Neill speaks for all of Whitehall when he promotes the concept of Total Place. But further ‘clarification’ from his ministerial colleagues across Whitehall and the Treasury, indicating their position, would be helpful.
That said, local government and its local partners should not wait for government to make more pronouncements. This is the time to demonstrate ‘effective local leadership’ . This means focusing on people and not institutions, personal control or personal aggrandisement. This could be hard emotionally challenging for many local leaders. Total Place will only survive if it evolves as an engine to help deliver the new agenda, and should neither be seen or promoted as a means of survival for the public sector. I believe that the successful pilots have already provided ample evidence of its potential.
As the old agenda is replaced the old Total Place becomes redundant. But it can and does deserve to rise ‘Phoenix’-like in some new form, provided we can construct and encourage a new facilitating architecture for co-operation and partnership at local level and between the centre and localities.
John Tizard is director of the Centre for Public Service Partnerships (CPSP@LGiU)
Well I suppose one of the first ‘threats’ to the Total Place concept may indeed be Michael Gove’s ministerial plan for the central funding and removal of schools from local government control. Each government eventually begins to pursue the particular at the expense of the general but here we see individual ministers at it on ‘Day One’; pursuing an individual path in a crucial area of public policy – and prior to any general debate. And it is more proof – if proof were needed – that the greatest threat to any local ‘total approach’ has always been from the central government itself and individual ministerial initiatives; initiatives that are then encouraged by Whitehall internal departmental politics with little or no regard for the impact on associated local programmes that bear in on that service at every turn. All this was also evidentially the case in the earlier ‘total approaches’ – including the precedent I helped to initiate in 1972.
So here we go again. Then too the other major factor hampering the earlier ‘total approach’ was the abiding failure to reach a consensus view about local government finance or central local relationships in general. Layfield certainly didn’t help. Crucially, too, neither Layfield nor the relevant department (then DOE) were much bothered about policies for renewing the local economic base for improvement in real incomes. Evelyn Sharp saw that this would cause problems since, as she said, economic prosperity meant more to people than anything else and was, itself, the condition for improving local environments. Nor was local government itself always anxious to pursue a wider agenda; in 1972 some council chief executives were pressing Whitehall permanent secretaries to take away education so that local resources could more easily match what local government had to do!
Those defeatist local arguments found eager audiences at national levels after 1974 – when housing led the general charge towards the privatised and voluntary state – and with Michael Gove’s plan endorsed, presumably by the Liberal Democrats, do we finally recognise the tri-partisan nature of this constitutional ambition? Certainly three and a half decades ago a clutch of clever and well placed people recognised our demise as a manufacturing nation – but at the same time realising we still possessed both valuable assets and basic continuing needs. Not only could the assets be sold off but the continuing human need for essential life-chance services promised a more permanent source of profit. This was the ultimate ‘sweet’ option for outsourcing and even for the offshoring of our public service industries; the mass of people would always need water and power and housing – and a health service and transport and, yes, they would always need local schools!
Thus public service management buy-outs began to proliferate – and a new phenomenon of ‘fat cats’ surfaced within ministries and municipalities and running the diverse new service delivery agencies. Our national ‘statutory undertakers’ (electricity, gas, nuclear power, etc) were among the first to be privatised and then mostly sold off abroad. What was once our independent voluntary movement became a sort of state financed ‘half way house’ (initially even 100% deficit budgeted when first ‘privatising’ public sector housing!). And all this suited our style of ‘sofa government’ very well as individual ministers preached public participation while actually bypassing parliament (perish the thought of any effective parliamentary supply procedure!) and while attacking alternative sources of local power at their electoral and financial roots. It was rich pickings, too, for those who “retired” to run (and sometimes then re-sell!) services previously privatised while in post – or just joining the boardrooms of the banks that “financed” the whole thing.
All of which to say is that any “total approach” worth the name should embrace the whole of government. And while we welcome every initiative promoting more comprehensive local efforts we must recognise that this simply will not happen while the central government goes dabbling in everything in such an ad hoc way. It will not happen until Whitehall manages to clearly define its own central strategic role as something that is necessarily separate from matters of local service delivery. And there must also be a clear read across between that central strategic financing and the annual supply procedure. Then, too, (as happens in most competent comparable countries but not here) public audit should systematically inform that annual budgetary process. Finally as in other countries (but again not here) this total process should be systematically validated by parliament – as opposed to the present ad hoc ministerial initiatives. Total will then mean total!