Total Place ‘Pilots Plus’ could help break the public service doom loop
With the Autumn Budget in sight, Former Secretary of State John Denham and New Local’s Jessica Studdert make the case for Total Place 2.0.
The idea at the heart of place-based budgets is simple: identify how all taxpayers’ money is spent across services and agencies in a local area and bend it to meet the needs of people within it. Our paper published in January advocated this shift away from the fragmentation and low impact of services organised within separate organisational silos towards funding and accountability more closely aligned to the realities of communities and places.
The dire fiscal inheritance this government is picking up only makes the need to test new ways of working more urgent.
Our proposals struck a chord with many: sometimes dubbed ‘Total Place 2.0,’ they received support from people who had worked on the original pilot programme 15 years ago. Its enduring logic chimed with others grappling with the present-day priority to maximise the impact of public service spending in the face of rising demand pressures and constrained resources.
With a new Labour government now in place, there is an opportunity to initiate a renewed approach to Total Place. This would capture the lessons of the original pilots and supplement them with learning from the years since of locally led, community-powered practice that deepens impact. Some key figures are in positions to lead a new approach – Minister for Local Government Jim McMahon has previously backed Total Place principles. Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould, who endorsed our paper while leader of Camden Council, now has responsibility for public sector reform.
The dire fiscal inheritance this government is picking up only makes the need to test new ways of working more urgent. In her “black hole” speech to Parliament, Chancellor Rachel Reeves recognised this need to forge a “new approach to public service reform to drive greater productivity”, which would “embed an approach to government that is mission-led, that is reform-driven, with a greater focus on prevention and the integration of services at a national and local level”. With greater long term certainty created by plans for multi-year funding settlements for the public sector, there is an important moment in the Autumn Budget to begin a path towards a deeper system shift.
‘Pilots Plus’: a better way of trialling Total Place
We now propose that the government should proceed at pace with a new phase of Total Place-style pilots which would chart a new approach. We purposefully did not propose pilots in our original paper – the learning from 20 years of place pilots is already overwhelming and the desired end point is fundamental system reform, not time-limited, isolated and patchy initiatives. However, change has to start somewhere, and it is not realistic to implement Total Place across all services, everywhere, and all at once.
the most farsighted councils seek to “double-run” both a short-term response to financial pressures and in parallel trial new ways of working
The Government has already indicated the need to manage expectations ahead of an expected “painful” Budget, where the priority will be fiscal constraint. But it will be both politically and practically essential to initiate a longer-term reform pathway in parallel to the macro tough actions. In local government, the most farsighted councils seek to “double-run” both a short-term response to financial pressures and in parallel trial new ways of working with a view to shifting from the former reactive to the latter preventative stance over the medium to long term.
A new wave of Total Place pilots, all public services and agencies across a place should contribute to mapping existing spending and identify ways in which it could be better coordinated to achieve more impact with communities. But for this to be a genuine first step in a wider system shift, these additional features also need to be present:
- Pilots should widely share real-time learning.
Rather than projects running for a couple of years and then being evaluated, they should be designed as real-time collaborative learning projects that can share insights and best practice as they emerge. Areas not formally designated as pilots should also be supported to be part of a wider action-learning community to share what works. Real-time understanding of cultural, structural and practice barriers and how they can be overcome will be essential. - Shared data and community insights should be at the heart of a new pilot phase.
Since 2010, data capabilities have advanced significantly, but public services do not yet share population-level data as standard. At the core of a new pilot phase, permission for data sharing must be enabled so that partners can also baseline population outcomes from the existing siloed spend model. Data alone, even layered across public agencies, will only tell a partial story unless it is also interpreted with the insights of those at the heart of it. Places should be expected to engage communities that are experiencing worse outcomes or unequal access to existing provision to inform how support is better coordinated. The original Total Place was about partner coordination; Total Place 2.0 should have active community participation at the core. - Pilots should draw on good practice and be anchored into local priorities.
Most of the ‘wicked issues’ in budget pooling, from redesigning preventive services to solving the legal, financial and ethical issues in data sharing, have almost certainly been solved by someone, somewhere in the past few years. We need to avoid the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome. Each area participating should be able to choose a cross-cutting theme to focus on and build collaboration around in the first instance, such as long-term unemployment, so that a broad range of insights into the existing system is captured. - The pilots should reflect the emerging devolution landscape in England and cover different scales, geographies, levels of deprivation, and political leadership.
Some mayoral combined authorities are already developing interesting public service reform plans. For example, Liverpool City Region is developing a new Office for Public Sector Innovation, which would potentially have a data insight function across the subregion. However, it will still be important to test the approach at the borough, county, and unitary levels and amongst some districts in two-tier areas. We don’t yet know either the best geography for analysis and data sharing or the most effective level for service re-design. - The pilots should reflect the Government’s mission-driven approach, with learning plugged straight into central government.
The long term, outcome-focused characteristics of Total Place-style collaboration are well-suited to Labour’s five core missions and the need to mobilise across silos that missions imply. Accordingly, all domestic spending departments should be engaged in the pilot process, which could more explicitly work within the missions at place level. For example, in relation to the health mission, as many in local government will attest, the NHS is a notoriously bad partner to other public services in places, rarely engaging beyond its direct service priorities even through new ICS structures. Non-engagement in the pilots should not be an option, and this will require a clear steer from Whitehall if true integration is to occur around the health needs of the local population.
The new Office of Value for Money should play a strong role in reinforcing and disseminating the emerging evidence of better value for money from breaking down spending silos that is gained from pilots and developing new investment models. They should have a remit to ensure that ‘horizontal learning’ across the pilots can be integrated quickly across central government spending programmes. The Treasury will need to be engaged, but in keeping with the principle that a new phase is not about cost saving, but about achieving more impact from existing spend.
As we approach the first fiscal event of a new government, there can be no illusion that the financial outlook is anything other than incredibly tough. But at the start of a five-year Parliament, there is now a rare opportunity to initiate a process of testing and learning that would begin to shift our system of public services away from the reactive stance they are currently mired in, fragmented across silos, and instead begin a journey towards a more preventative, sustainable footing. It is time to launch Total Place 2.0.
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