Davy Jones Consultancy

There is a new BIG IDEA in town - Total Place. It's a good idea but it does now appear to mean all things to all people.

First to coin the phrase was Sir Michael Bichard in his Efficiency Report accompanying the Budget. He argued that the recession meant marginal savings would not be adequate in this recession and a new cross-services review of provision was needed in every locality.

WHY CUTS?

Let us pause a minute here. Why are all the "main" political parties and most commentators (see Steve Bundred of the Audit Commission's outrageous recent pronouncement on the subject) agreed that savage cuts in public spending are inevitable ? They are not. There is a perfectly credible alternative of INCREASING public expenditure as a way of getting out of recession - ploughing money into public services and sustainable jobs ("A Green New Deal") that all these experts are coveniently ignoring. Beware the "cuts are inevitable" brigade - they are ideologically driven by old-fashioned market economics.

But I digressed...

Total Place could be a good thing. Government has latched on to it and launched 13 pilots round the country. More areas have jumped on the bandwagon. Primarily the pilots are looking at mapping all the public money coming into a local area and then how it is spent. This has been tried before. In the Area Profiles pilot I led at the Audit Commission we attempted the same but were thwarted by the lack of civil service/politician's political will to challenge old ways of doing things.

But making transparent how local money is spent is pretty much a prerequisite for any serious attempt at involving citizens in mainstream budget decisions (PB especially). So the momentum behind Total Place is encouraging.

Impact of Total Place

But Total Place is coming to mean more than just financial mapping. It is also increasingly being portrayed as a first step to reconstructing all local public services from the bottom up in a more rational and cost effective way. This makes it very interesting. In particular, this approach makes it possible to begin to "think the unthinkable" and to address those extremely difficult issues in shaping low carbon communities for the future. It will be a tragedy if local authorities don't grasp the opportunity afforded by the recession and Total Place to engage citizens in a meaningful dialogue about how best to do this.

The future is local

None of this will happen though unless Government (of any persuasion) significantly shifts power back to the local level - including raising the finances for local services. The latest John Denham consultation on "Strengthening Local Communities" proposes a few modest steps in this direction - extending council scrutiny of other local services and the possible introduction of local carbon budgets. But these steps are nowhere near enough.

The results of the most recent survey of LSPs (in 2008) have just been published. I was one of the report co-authors. Its findings include that the least progress has been made locally on pooling local budgets, and that LSPs still feel that Government centralism is the greatest obstacle to LSPs being able to fulfil their roles properly.

Step forward Total Place - but let's make it TOTAL LOCAL SUSTAINABLE PLACE!