We can’t just leave things to the big society

By Chris Williamson MP

Innovative solutions are required if we are to successfully enable those families who are trapped by a combination of poverty and geography to aspire to – and achieve – a better life. In my view, this isn’t something that can be left to David Cameron’s so-called ‘Big Society’.

There is only so much that charities, voluntary organisations and local neighbourhoods can achieve on their own. There has to be a role for democratically accountable statutory agencies to play a part in delivering better outcomes for the communities they serve.

The Total Place programme that was adopted by Labour in 2009 represented a really good start at doing so. It was designed to look at public spending and local leadership in 13 areas to identify how significant efficiencies and better collaboration could be achieved.

Total Place was first outlined in the White Paper ‘Smarter Government: Putting the frontline first’. It stated that: “Total Place pilots will provide evidence of how to unlock value within an area…by reducing duplication and…services more squarely on the needs of the users.” It promised freedoms and flexibilities that would help to “recast the relationship” between the centre and the frontline. The 13 areas in England that were covered by the initiative included 63 local authorities, 34 primary care trusts and 13 police authorities. They included a wide range of socio-economic and demographic characteristics, different local authority structures, a population of some 11 million people and a budget worth more than £82bn in public spending.

Each pilot area addressed a range of challenging issues, which included tackling unemployment and worklessness, crime and offender management including dealing with people leaving prison and young offenders’ institutions. The pilot projects also dealt with young people leaving the care system and commissioning health and social care services for children and adults.

This place-based approach to local public services demonstrated that it is possible to use a pioneering new approach to deliver better outcomes and improved value for money. The early success of the pilots was highlighted in another government publication “Total Place: a whole area approach to public services”, which set out the case for change stressing the value of early intervention and data sharing. It also pointed to the complexity and fragmentation of public services when viewed from the citizen’s perspective. This makes it more difficult to tackle the downward spiral caused by poverty that leads to low aspiration and creates a trap into which too many families have fallen.

Apart from the moral imperative, the other key driver to developing a new approach is the unprecedented cuts in public spending. Public bodies must identify significant efficiencies if they are to have any chance of playing a part in helping families living in poverty to transform their lives for the better. I was initially encouraged when the Conservative-led government said it supported the principles of Total Place. The evidence from the pilots showed that real savings could be made at the same time as improving the outcomes for local people. But the decision to alter and rebrand it as a ‘Community Budget’ is potentially disastrous. The government has effectively neutered its new Community Budget proposal by excluding health, police and probation services that were included in the original Total Place initiative. The fragmentation of schools funding, abolition of PCTs and the introduction of elected police commissioners with their own agenda will make effective joint working almost impossible.

Yet it is in society’s interests to find ways of unlocking the pool of human talent that is wasted because families who are poor are often ground down by coping with multiple problems. Poverty and lack of aspiration can often lead to alcohol and drug abuse, criminality and anti-social behaviour. Yet the government’s response to the problems caused by long term unemployment, poverty and deprivation is to bury its collective head in the sand. Inflicting unprecedented public spending cuts whilst simultaneously dropping a proven methodology to do more with less is frankly bonkers. The government’s approach could create a perfect storm leaving local authorities unable to cope. With rising unemployment, poverty and deprivation, local councils and other public bodies will be faced with rising demands on their services. But with much reduced budgets and far fewer staff to deliver public services, the challenges for many local authorities will prove to be overwhelming.

The danger is that in such an environment, vulnerable families will get less support and that could create big problems in the future. Moving away from Total Place and restricting Community Based Budgets to local government funding, albeit with less ring fencing, undermines the ability to address the needs of disadvantaged families with complex needs. As the Total Place pilots showed, there are considerable social, economic and financial advantages to a joined-up approach to such households. I have seen the benefits of early intervention with young people at risk of getting involved in criminality and anti-social behaviour, which can have remarkable outcomes. I know young people who were abusing drugs, committing burglaries and whose parents didn’t know how to be parents who have been able to completely turn their lives around.

In addition to the direct benefits to the young people and their families, such interventions provide massive long-term savings to the public purse and huge benefits to the wider community too. My worry is that because Community Budgets are restricted to local government funding, opportunities will be lost to develop new ground-breaking ways to help people transform their lives. John Tizard, the director of the Centre for Public Service Partnerships seems to agree. He suggests that councils should be given total discretion over how they work with families who have complex needs in order to develop and introduce truly innovative long-term sustainable solutions. He believes it is essential that the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentre Plus are devolved to localities. He describes Community Budgets as “a compromise too far” and asks why the DCLG has failed to convince other Whitehall departments of the benefits of localism based on democratic local government. It is a good question, but I doubt he will get a sensible answer out of the Tory Secretary of State who is in denial about the impact of the cuts.

Eric Pickles’ insists that reduced funding won’t lead to big cutbacks in local government services, but that assertion is only credible in the most affluent Tory strongholds. The poorest parts of the country are being hammered making his Community Budgets nothing more than a useless gimmick. In these areas the local authority is usually the main employer. But with large-scale council redundancies being announced, working class communities are going to be particularly hard hit by deteriorating public services and far fewer job opportunities. But genuine localism, exemplified in Labour’s Total Place programme, offered a blueprint to transform public services and the lives of millions of families who rely on them.

One thing is certain – Eric Pickles’ ‘Total Place Lite’ is not the answer.