Many a column inch has been dedicated to Total Place over recent months exploring whether this strategy could achieve the â??holy grailâ?? of improved services for citizens at the same time as making significant efficiency gains.

Converging pressures partly explain why such scrutiny is being given to the initiative. The financial situation, rising citizen expectations and increased demand for services are igniting and fuelling a burning platform. It is no-longer whether we should jump but how far, at what time and in what direction.

In understanding how to respond, the redesign of public services must learn from the current disjointedness, and be informed by the underlying dynamics shaped by politicians, government departments, delivery agents and service users themselves. New models should also include an honest recognition of what needs to change for the opportunities of Total Place to be realised and sustained. In short, we must react not only to the opportunities available, but also to the failure, tensions and ‘risk’ within our existing approaches in order to make the necessary leap forward.

Pilots are indicating that our current systems of government are too disjointed and fractured for us to respond in the optimum way to the needs of citizens and communities. For instance, it was discovered that those out of work may receive up to nineteen different assessments in a year; another pilot revealed that there are fifty different benefit types each with its own form, rules and administrative function.

Many of these inefficiencies stem ultimately from a lack of coherence across government departments and a historic reluctance to devolve. Resource and responsibility are held centrally rather than at the local level. This results in the silos that exist at a national level being reinforced locally, as public agencies often remain at the behest of their relevant government departments in what at times can be likened to a ‘parent – child’ relationship. The theoretical commitment to joint working and the pooling of resources can be overshadowed by historic cultures, working practices and reporting structures. Locally, public agencies find themselves pulled in both horizontal and vertical directions, with one championing the needs of place, and the other the priorities of central government. The two are not always mutually compatible, and one has to win out. When agencies account and report upwards, too often this is the latter.

Meanwhile, many of the actions relating to the longer term sustainability of a Total Place approach are inherently political. Some of the solutions to working together better at a local level will require sensitive decisions to be made around issues such as resource allocation, early intervention, commissioning, and also crucially de-commissioning. These are difficult choices that citizens should have a voice in guiding. And, hand in hand, greater political integration is required so that democratically-elected leaders can be provided with the legitimacy, discretion and scope to take decisions on behalf of their communities.

Major reform is needed to establish a different culture and architecture of government. Clearer co-ordination at the centre combined with greater devolved responsibility to local areas would represent a significant leap from current working practices. However, only this will provide the infrastructure to empower local stakeholders to step up to the plate, and develop specifically tailored solutions centred round the needs of a place and its residents.

In the first place, strong integrated leadership and vision, of a type that has eluded Whitehall in the past, must be introduced at the centre. NLGN has concluded that the Government should give serious consideration to establishing a Department for Devolved Government to include the current Department for Communities and Local Government, the Cabinet Office and the offices for Scotland and Wales. This new ‘super department’ would have the objective of bringing strategy together across central government. At the same time it would identify and devolve the powers held in Whitehall to allow local service delivery and improvement. This function would be far more capable than existing arrangements in driving the necessary change across the whole of government in the interests of place. Such a department would also provide clear strategic input into Treasury commitments, to ensure that resource allocation can follow local priorities and be deployed appropriately.

A new series of ‘Place Proposition Agreements’ should also be instituted across the country. These would allow local areas to set out a business case for how services could be better configured to unlock efficiencies and drive improvement in return for greater freedoms, responsibility and control from central government.

The Total Place pilots have set out both the risks in our current systems and the opportunities available when services can be built around local communities. It is now time for the central state to make the jump that local areas have identified they are ready to take.

Greater than the sum of its parts: Total Place and the future shape of public services by Nigel Keohane and Geraldine Smith was published by NLGN on 18th March 2010. Please visit www.nlgn.org.uk to access the report.