Five reasons the Government should launch Total Place 2.0

Building on the case set out in their original joint report Place-based Public Service Budgets, John Denham and Jessica Studdert set out five reasons why now is the time for Total Place 2.0.

As we approach the long-awaited Spending Review on June 11, no one will envy the tough choices facing Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Squaring the circle of threadbare public finances and rising demand on overstretched public services is the big reform challenge of our era. No one expects rabbits to be pulled out of hats, but amidst difficult choices, there is one policy option open to the government that would lay the groundwork for a deep shift in how public investment secures better outcomes: Total Place 2.0.

The idea behind Total Place, a policy conceived originally and piloted at the end of the last Labour Government, is as simple as it is logical: identify the totality of public spending in each local authority area across all services and bring partners and communities together to work out how it could better meet local priorities.

We can no longer tolerate the diminishing returns of a silo-led model of provision that is not set up to deal with the reality of people’s lives.

As we set out in our paper, Place-based Public Service Budgets, in early 2024, when we first made the case for Total Place 2.0, the challenges facing public finances necessitate finding new ways to make better use of existing spending. Since then, the case for change has continued to grow. Here we set out five reasons Total Place 2.0 needs to happen:

1. Total Place 2.0 would reduce the inefficiency of nationally directed services that are poorly coordinated locally. The motivations behind the original Total Place pilots are as real today as they were 15 years ago: fragmented services that operate under individual departmental accountabilities, separating provision across health, work, and skills, for example, and each treating a separate aspect of an individual’s life. This creates both gaps through which those with the most complex life circumstances fall, and costly duplication, as too many people are assessed and referred around the system, as Hilary Cottam powerfully illustrated in Radical Help. The difference in 2025 compared to 2010 is that we are running out of fiscal road: we can no longer tolerate the diminishing returns of a silo-led model of provision that is not set up to deal with the reality of people’s lives.
   
2. Total Place 2.0 would support a genuine shift away from crisis reaction towards prevention. The austerity model sought efficiencies within service siloes instead of identifying better ‘allocative efficiency’ across them. One consequence of this is that our public services are now trapped in a doom loop. They must focus on acute, pressing demands at the expense of upfront investment in prevention, which, in turn, reduces early intervention support that might stop crises from escalating. The pooled funding that would be brought together from services across a place might be termed a local ‘prevention budget’. The approach underpinning this would see partners collectively sharing and interrogating population data, identifying demand pinch points and supporting new models of integrated working that would better respond holistically to community needs. This is the direction of travel across, for example, the NHS’s moves towards neighbourhood health and prevention aspirations in the English Devolution White Paper, but now needs to be brought together under a precise mechanism to share budgets for prevention under clear local democratic oversight.
   
3. Total Place 2.0 would support better outcomes for communities. The type of place-based collaboration that a Total Place approach would unlock is better for communities, as it would support a shift towards more human-focused, relational services that are empowered to work towards their priorities, respond to their insight and involve them in service redesign. The qualitative insights of communities would be an essential part of locally initiated new approaches. For example, where locally layered data from different public service agencies identifies communities that face persistently poor outcomes, they should be actively involved in shaping new responses that better meet their needs. This would build on pioneering approaches to radical community involvement and neighbourhood-level approaches such as that of GP Andy Knox in Lancashire working alongside the Gypsy Roma and Traveller community and the impact of Cradle to Career in North Birkenhead which took a collective impact approach to agencies locally working to shared objectives to boost children’s life chances.
   
4. Total Place 2.0 would galvanise and motivate the public sector frontline workforce. Years of austerity, the long tail of the pandemic, and real terms pay stagnation are taking their toll on the public sector workforce. No one enters public service to manage a creaking system, uphold entitlement thresholds, or participate in endless efficiency drives. The challenges facing the public sector workforce are complex. Still, a renewed Total Place approach would be part of a solution that upholds respect and value for the expertise of frontline public servants. The Liberated Method, pioneered in Gateshead and Northumbria, demonstrated the huge energy that can be unlocked by giving public services the autonomy to establish human relationships with people and work alongside them creatively to build their capability. Reports from those involved in the original Total Place pilots, such as in Cumbria, speak of the tremendous optimism and possibility that different and open partnership working was fostered.
   
5. Total Place 2.0 is a very popular policy. There are few other “oven-ready” policies out there that combine sheer logic with a nascent evidence base. The original pilots were never mainstreamed because they fell victim to a change of Government, but in the years since, the evidence base from multiple, successive place pilots has only grown Initiatives like whole-place community budget pilots in 2013 and the  Troubled Families programme (changed to Supporting Families) from 2015 – 2020 demonstrate positive social and financial outcomes. For this reason, Total Place 2.0 is a policy that has lots of advocates across the public policy community, with many think tanks adding their backing to it and contributing to the case for change, including Institute for Government; Demos and CLES. A policy and practitioner-led Total Place Network has even been set up by advocates to build momentum behind the idea. With the place-based Test, Learn and Grow programme already in motion, led by the Cabinet Office, a renewed drive towards pooled place-based budgets would provide further system-level push in this direction.

In summary, as a policy that would tick the boxes of the Treasury (efficiency), big Whitehall domestic spending departments (prevention), communities (outcomes), the public sector workforce (liberated), and the policy community (evidence-led), Total Place 2.0 is surely a no-brainer.

Photo by Emma Wang on Unsplash.

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