Recently, quite a fuss has been made in the public sector about ‘Total Place’. But what is it? In a sentence, it’s a pilot scheme which is counting and mapping all the public sector money spent in particular areas, with the aim of reducing wasteful duplication and improving the experiences of service users.

The Communities and Local Government (CLG) department, with the backing of the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, has asked 13 local authority areas to run pilots. The money has already been counted, and each locality has picked an issue which is particularly important to them – such as drugs and alcohol, or children’s services – to see how they might do things differently.

The idea has the potential to revolutionise public services – but if its catchy name and a certain degree of hype do not mask a really substantial change to working methods, it risks ending up as a fad; an idea that briefly enthuses people, before disappearing from view.

Those involved with the pilots are certainly enthusiastic about the idea, but also aware of the risks involved. Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham, told a Labour conference fringe meeting that Total Place is “a nice catchphrase” and warned that people are in danger of believing that “this is the big idea”. Speaking alongside him, Labour councillor and South Tyneside local authority leader Iain Malcolm criticised the “jargon” emerging from CLG: he had been asked to “deep-dive” into drugs and alcohol issues. “I love these phrases,” he said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

The speed with which the Total Place pilots are being carried out has also raised suspicions that it is just a gimmick. Announced and launched in April, Whitehall asked the councils involved to have their calculations and submissions ready by September, for a pre-Budget report (PBR) that was originally intended to take place in October. Malcolm said that South Tyneside “could only do an approximate guess” of funding streams. “If we’d been given more time, we could have found more public money being spent in the region,” he revealed.

Making it about more than the money
As well as making it a rush job, Malcolm said the focus on producing something for the next Budget “leads to the concern that this is all about saving money”. Cutting costs is part of Total Place – eliminating unnecessary duplication will be efficient for service-providers and, in theory, better for service users too – but everyone who is involved with the initiative insists that it has to be about more than money. In fact, there is the possibility that Total Place will, initially, cost more, not less, as local authorities spend to save – for example, by investing in shared services for back office functions.

While the pace of the pilots has been quick, Lewisham mayor Bullock thinks that may actually be a good thing. “If you want to build momentum, you do need to do it quickly. It may well be that getting this started in a crash-bang way makes sense,” he tells Civil Service World. “We’ve talked a lot about things like Total Place in the past and not made a lot of progress.”

One person who understands Total Place well is public sector consultant Stephen Taylor. Formerly chief executive of the Leadership Centre for Local Government, which designed the pilots currently being carried out, Taylor was involved with the Total Place precursors that took place in areas such as Cumbria and Birmingham. He also believes the pilot timescale is “far too challenging” and that central government sees this primarily as a cost-cutting measure.

“The danger is that the incoming government says there is no money and it has no choice but to start hacking” when the initiative actually needs 10 years to change a whole culture, he says. “There is always a danger that something becomes a fad because we think we should write it off if it doesn’t deliver in three months,” he warns.

Changing the system
The current chief executive of the Leadership Centre for Local Government, John Atkinson, is more upbeat, pointing out that the submission to the government ahead of the PBR “is not primarily about numbers”. “It is about the things that are limiting councils from doing things better, and what might be done about them,” he says. One of the biggest obstacles mentioned, reports Atkinson, is ring-fenced budgets. According to Bullock, Lewisham council identified £2.5bn of public funding being spent in its area, but the council’s budget was only £800m, and the council only had discretion over less than £100m – just four per cent of the total.

There are, the mayor warns, lots of other “not very exciting” obstacles to better cross-agency working at the local level, such as different pay structures and ways of accounting. Access to good data is another problem for councils trying to measure the effectiveness of initiatives: Bullock says crime statistics are a “quagmire”, with some figures showing a fall in knife crime in Lewisham and others showing a rise. Department of Health (DH) data on teenage pregnancies operates on a two-year lag, he adds, and local employment data is not available quickly enough because it is being checked and compiled into national figures. Malcolm agrees: “It is like pulling teeth to get data from these agencies.”

Atkinson says that as well as ring-fencing, two other major obstacles have been identified in pilot area submissions: the performance-management regimes that push services to focus on their own priorities rather than working with other agencies; and the failure to design services around the service user, rather than the delivery organisations.

This means that one of the biggest obstacles – or enablers – to Total Place will be the attitude of officials in Whitehall. As Bullock says: “In local government, we have learnt to work across boundaries. We’re not perfect, but our experience over many years has been that central government departments tend to be monolithic, and not join up what is happening across government.” For example, he says, DH is currently changing the way commissioning is done so that it is carried out across primary care trust (PCT) boundaries, and this may hinder any local authority that wants its local PCT to focus on a particular priority, because it may not also be a priority for neighbouring PCTs.

Local problems, local decisions
The solution must be for central government to “genuinely empower the local delivery arm of its services”, argues Bullock. “It comes back to a mindset that says: ‘We will give our local managers the power to come to arrangements with local partners, and if that gets in the way of some central directive, we won’t do what the civil service has done for decades: say that central directives take precedence. We’ll try and find a solution.’ That will require a more flexible approach.”

There is a chink of light in all this: the very fact that Total Place is being piloted means it has backing at the highest levels of government. There is a ministerial group looking into Total Place, and the panel considering the submissions of the 13 pilot areas is chaired by Sir Michael Bichard, author of the local empowerment section of the government’s Operational Efficiency Programme report. That panel also contains directors-general and other senior officials from the big policy departments.

Public sector consultant Taylor says he is “detecting some energy in the civil service to act on the barriers”, and he believes that the “huge amount of inertia” which is always present within the public sector will be tested by the recession. Financial constraint “forces people to act”, he argues. But, warns Bullock, the support of ministers and heads of departments will not be sufficient. “You can’t just have the top saying that it’s a great idea; you have to have people who are committed to it at all levels of the organisation,” he explains. “We are going to have to say to the civil service: ‘This is not just here today and gone tomorrow. This is going to be a different way of working’.”

Atkinson, at the Leadership Centre, also warns that “we shouldn’t underestimate the inertia”, but believes it is more than possible to get the oil tanker turning. “We can reach a tipping point by getting more and more people involved, and more and more people in departments having the experience of this different perspective,” he argues. “In the end, that gives it a momentum.”

If the civil service plays ball, what will a successful Total Place scheme look like? Speak to those involved, and ideas vary widely – but there is a common thread: the longer the project runs, commentators agree, the more effective and transformative it will be. Bullock, for example, says that if the initiative can solve even the “not very exciting problems” such as accessing another agency’s data, “it will be a success on that basis alone”. “But,” he adds, “it has the potential to do much more”.

One likely outcome is the bringing together of back office functions – between local government, health and policing agencies, for example. But Atkinson says such costs only constitutes about 10 per cent of spending, and are small fry compared to the “real saving and real value to the local resident” that could come with differently-delivered services.

He gives the example of Kent County Council’s ‘Gateways’, which have brought multiple agencies under the same roof for people wanting to access routine advice, make payments for services, and access surgeries by social services, health professionals, or employment and benefits advisers. In another example, the multitude of visitors knocking on a family’s door could be reduced to just one – perhaps the person they have the best relationship with. “Does it make sense to deal with one key person rather than a multiplicity?”, asks Atkinson. “What do families want? They want someone to come in and get stuff fixed.”

Tackling the democratic deficit
Even further down the line, the initiative could change the local government landscape: Bullock and Malcolm talk about bringing health and police strategies under the remit of local authorities. Malcolm firmly believes that Total Place should be seen by councils as an opportunity: “If local government is bold, then we can say to Whitehall that there are savings to be made and that there are some services we can provide better.”

Another long-term goal for Total Place proponents is the ability to move the public sector’s efforts from reacting to social problems to preventing them in the first place. At the moment, says Bullock, there is no financial incentive for an agency or local authority to spend money on a problem if the savings are going to be netted by other branches of the public sector – and much further in the future. Barnsley and Lewisham wanted some reward for getting people off incapacity benefit, says Bullock, but Treasury rules don’t allow for this, because every agency has its own budget and they are calculated on a 12-month basis. “It is really frustrating,” he complains. “We need to spread that investment over a number of years and ‘forward-fund’ the activity, knowing [that in the future] there will be savings to the benefit budget and the local economy.”

Atkinson gives another example of the “really bold” stuff that Total Place could achieve: one per cent of children are in care, he says, but 33 per cent of the prison population are from a care background. Early intervention with those vulnerable children could reap huge savings for the prison and probation services, not to mention reducing the number of crime victims.

A mood change
It’s hard not to get excited about such a proposition. But is this a case of getting everyone’s hopes up for nothing? Will the people at the centre really let go of the levers of power? Taylor believes so: while similar initiatives such as floor targets and Local Strategic Partnerships failed in the past to get the full buy-in of higher-level decision makers, he suggests that “there’s a mood change over the last few years, and I haven’t seen that before.” He believes this is because “we have got all the ingredients”: a step-change in the relationship between central and local government; professional empowerment in local services; and because “socialisation of the state has gone too far and is not being any more productive”.

South Tyneside, says Malcolm, is somewhere where “millions of pounds had been pumped into the community”, yet it remains among the 35 most deprived boroughs in the country. “That can’t be right”, he says; the problem has been that “agencies aren’t talking to each other”.

This kind of thinking is certainly current in Labour circles; ministers at this year’s party conference were falling over themselves to predict the end of command and control, and to herald a new dawn for localism. But will the Conservatives, who have been extolling the virtues of devolution from Tory town halls, feel the same way once behind their Whitehall desks? And will Whitehall civil servants at all levels engage with the Total Place idea in the same way that their political masters seem to have done?

Local government and local delivery arms of public services have been aware of the need to join up their services for years. So has central government – but it has been slower to act on that knowledge. Total Place will only be a revolution – and not just a buzz word added to the pile of past-it initiatives that litter the public sector – if Whitehall plays ball and allows those at the sharp end to make their own decisions.

Barry Quirk, chief executive of Lewisham Council, is to speak at the More for Less conference on November 26. See www.moreforlessconference.co.uk

Total Place-making: the origins of a pilot

The pilots being run by CLG with 13 local authorities have not come out of thin air. In fact, former civil servant Des McConaghy claims in a Guardian piece that he carried out a strikingly similar project on six cities in 1972. More recently, Total Place-like projects in areas such as Cumbria and Birmingham predate Sir Michael Bichard’s Total Place proposal.

‘Calling Cumbria’ and ‘Counting Cumbria’, backed by the Leadership Centre for Local Government, was embarked on because of the very poor state of agency relations in the area – partly due to recent debates about local government reorganisation. Starting in 2007, local leaders from the area’s public services met up, counted all the money in the area, and thought about what they wanted to spend it on. The project calculated that a one per cent improvement in performance could result in a saving of £70m.

The CLG Total Place pilots are not the only areas looking at this concept of counting combined budgets and better cross-agency planning: Norfolk and Suffolk are just some of the councils carrying out similar work.