Place-based budgets puts citizens at the core of policy making

A package of public sector reforms set to save £100 billion based on the radical devolution of power has been announced by the Local Government Association (LGA) at its annual conference. According to Objective Corporation, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to save money and give people a bigger say in the public sector.

In its report – ‘Place-based budgets – The future governance of local public services’ – the LGA has put forward the argument that councils or groups of councils should be responsible to local voters and Parliament for spending on frontline services under a new system of ‘place-based budgeting’.

In a keynote speech made to the LGA conference in Bournemouth, Dame Margaret Eaton, Chairman of the Association called for a programme of change to strip out the plethora of funding streams, accountability regimes, ring fenced budgets, quangos and funding bodies, which cost billions to run.

The report calls for local decision-makers to oversee economic regeneration, planning, housing and regeneration, home energy efficiency, flood and climate risk, adult services, local transport, primary health care, policing and support into employment for the long term unemployed.

Simon Etherington, General Manager UK, Objective Corporation, stated: “Improved public services at lower cost are the driving force behind the place-based budgets concept. It advocates a collaborative approach to achieving efficiencies through the delivery of local solutions to meet local needs. To deliver on the core principles of place-based budgeting, local authorities need to dramatically alter the way they interact with the community. This is nothing short of a revolution in the delivery of citizen-centric policy making that the new Coalition Government is embracing.”

According to the report itself: “These (past) ten years have produced a significant body of empirical evidence which shows that the top-down target-driven approach to improvement and efficiency has delivered neither uniformly better outcomes, though many outcomes did improve, nor higher public satisfaction, while the view has grown that public spending has reached unaffordable levels.”

The report goes on to advocate new ways of running services, reshaping of the public sector based on five core components:

• A move away from command-and-control provision to more citizen driven mechanisms
• Greater aggregation and simplification among the existing multitude of budgets and bureaucracies
• Greater devolution of managerial responsibility and decision-making
• Greater transparency
• Greater democratic leadership and outward accountability for decision-making to local people

Objective’s policy lifecycle management solution enables departments and agencies to share and collaborate on information specific to a particular place and local stakeholders to access consultations that are relevant to the local community. This ensures that policies and strategies are developed in collaboration between all relevant organisations, successfully addressing the inherent challenges of data silos and policies being developed in isolation.
 
The complexity of place-based budgeting creates a number of practical issues relating to the development of new policies and strategies that require efficient and effective partner collaboration, policy document production and public consultation. By adopting a shared platform, such as Objective, local communities will have a single view of policy creation and monitoring. Enabling a clear focus on place-based outcomes and allowing for the effective delivery of localised services based on the needs of the neighbourhood.