Whitehall needs to get grips with community based budgets

Needless red tape costs Westminster Council almost £1million a year - enough to cover the salaries of 26 teachers, 28 social workers or 44 street cleaners.

We also have to provide Whitehall with more than 2,500 separate pieces of data covering everything from noise, planning and pollution to food safety, rubbish collection and parking.

We now have an administration in place that says it knows that big centralised government is not necessarily good government and is committed to devolving power.

However, the coalition needs to go further and faster and really get to grips with the trail of audits, inspections and bureaucratic assessments that are stifling genuine innovation in local government and in particular stalling work around community budgets.

To take my own council as an example, Westminster is one of the government’s 16 pilots that are trialling the new community budgets finance scheme.

Our groundbreaking family recovery programme, which is designed to tackle issues around family breakdown, is at the heart of this new model. The service helps families with complex problems by pooling resources with organisations like the NHS and the Police.

We know that this programme works - it has resulted in reduced offending and incidents of anti-social behaviour, reduced numbers with rent arrears and improved health.

It also delivers savings to the public purse. The cost of taking 63 families through the programme in 2011/12 will be approximately £1 million. Based on an evaluation of the first 50 families who entered the programme, the total cost avoided that would otherwise spent, is £2.6 million.

However, the financial investment we make and the reward we get back from government for doing so are misaligned. We end up investing and while Whitehall benefits it does not contribute to the running costs of the programme.

The key issue, therefore, is the coalition’s apparent lack of willingness to pool budgets which means that Whitehall commissions in silos and leaves the local authority and its partners to make the joins.

Because of these factors we are restricted in the number of families we can assist. For Westminster, this means a reduction in the number of families with complex needs assisted in 2011/12.

We believe the way to solve this impasse is for Whitehall to have a single ‘owner’ to tackle issues such as family breakdown. If implemented we would then become the lead commissioner and responsible for all funding that is currently spent on family breakdown in the borough

Equally, while government can specify the outcome, it should be up to us to commission the right services to tackle ‘problem’ families in our area. This in turn would enable us to assist all families with complex needs rather than just a proportion which is what we are restricted to doing at present.

We are working with central government to lift bureaucratic restrictions that delay or build in cost but they now need to play their part and move forward speedily with their community based budget scheme so we can better meet the needs of our local communities.

Currently progress is slow, and Greg Clark’s promised report on the progress of localism across government  looks like being a depressing read unless together we can start delivering real pooled budgets.