In the news, Inside Track, March 2010
A radical approach to public spending
We have been supporting the Total Place pilot in Lewisham and have been part of the national dialogue between local agencies and central government departments to understand the opportunities that come from place-based government. Dozens of places as well as the 13 ‘official’ pilots have been putting customers and public service outcomes at the centre of a radical look at how state expenditure and state resources could be better used in a place.
The ‘official’ programme, sponsored by the Treasury and Department for Communities and Local Government, has been unusual in at least one respect – it recognised that if you want some very different answers then you need to set about looking for them in different ways.
The programme, to the discomfort of some, has not looked like the kind of engineered and controlled programme to which we have become accustomed. That has meant that the reports of the pilots, submitted in February, contained a richness of insights, promising ideas and things to try out but which are not strictly comparable.
We will have to wait and see how, if at all, this finds its way into this month’s Budget. What is clear to many of those who have been involved in this work is that there is significant inefficiency in the complex systems that exist to deliver public outcomes on the ground and that in a future of resource constraint there is no alternative but to continue the explorations and experiments of the Total Place mindset.
