Whitehall needs to devolve more powers to London to improve public service delivery as well as make local government more efficient.
While two of the 13 pilots for the Total Place project are happening in London boroughs, the capital is perhaps not so easily separated into single local areas as many local authorities around the country.
Having such a large number of local authorities in a relatively small geographic area means that London boroughs are linked in a way that is perhaps not mirrored in the rest of the country. Certainly, our residents tend not to think of themselves as residents of their borough, but as Londoners.
With this in mind, as the representative body for all local government in the capital, London Councils has been exploring the potential for Total Place thinking to deliver better, more efficient services to Londoners; and to consider its application on a pan-London basis.
Working together, London’s local government has led the way in delivering efficiency savings - totalling more than £393 million in 2008/09. That was £117m above government targets, far exceeding the achievements of any central government department, and all while setting council tax rates of less than half the national average.
But the scale of the challenge facing us today is such that it is no longer sufficient to keep looking for ways to squeeze the current model of delivery to make it a little more efficient here, a bit more effective there.
So while previous efficiency programmes have focused on looking for savings within the existing organisational boundaries of government; future delivery models will have to be radically re-shaped if the required scale of efficiencies is to be achieved, while meeting the growing demand and expectation for effective public services.
Last year we commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) to undertake a cost-mapping exercise of the £73.6 billion total public expenditure spent by the public sector in London last year.
We published their research at the end of January, and some of their headline findings will come as little surprise to many readers. For instance, the potential for London government to build on the efficiencies it has already delivered across public services in the capital is limited by the fact that only slightly more than half of the total public expenditure in London is directed via the capital’s local and regional government bodies.
Local government in London has no control over billions of pounds spent in the capital by the fourteen government departments that each control £100 million or more of London’s public expenditure, nor the staggering 169 quangos responsible for £5.6 billion of the capital’s public expenditure bill in 2008/09.
So what do we do about this? Well, London Councils also asked PwC to look in detail at spending in three specific areas – managing chronic care, worklessness and tackling anti-social behaviour – to see if there are more effective ways of directing some of that money.
Their findings were very interesting. PwC identified key foundations for successful public services, including early intervention, ‘case management’ support to individuals that cross many agencies and providing individuals with the ability to choose how and when they use public services.
Broadly, by applying these principles to the three services, PwC were able to identify savings of almost £1.6 billion. Obviously there is far more detail in the report, but the over-riding thrust of the research is that re-channelling funding through local bodies provides us with the opportunity to intervene earlier, with better, more tailored services.
The overriding lesson to be drawn from previous and existing efficiency programmes is that it is only through greater collaboration between different public services that significant improvements can be delivered – but that collaboration simply cannot happen if so much funding is held so centrally.
For a number of years now there has been a broad and deepening political consensus that government in the UK has become overly centralised and a re-balancing is needed, both to reverse an unhealthy decrease in democratic engagement and to improve the quality of services delivered to people at the local level.
Today, the radically changed financial environment for all public services precipitated by the global financial crisis has made the need to realise the benefits of devolution all the more urgent.
Because not only can devolution from central to local government offer better, more democratically accountable services to local people, but it can do so at far less cost to the public purse than the current centralised system of spending can ever achieve.