Whole Place Community Budgets

What are Whole Place Community Budgets?

Whole Place Community Budgets are redesigning an affordable local public sector, using the knowledge of local leaders and managers. Based on geography not organisations, they will evidence how to reduce cost, improve outcomes and focus on customers.

Background

At the 2011 LGA Conference the government launched its community budgets pilot programme.  This was followed in October 2011 by publication of the Community Budgets Prospectus:

Community Budgets Prospectus – on the Department for Communities and Local Government website

Pilot Schemes

The LGA, in conjunction with HM Government, have produced a guide to whole place community budgets which can be found here: 

Local Public Service Transformation - A Guide to Whole Place Community Budgets

The guide describes how partnerships between public sector organisations in four areas, Essex, Greater Manchester, West Cheshire and the London Tri-borough (Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster), piloted a new approach to local public service transformation during 2012.

The pilots will describe new delivery models that:

  • eliminate duplication, process, wasteful internal transaction costs
  • use public assets, back office and staff resources more efficiently
  • align targets and systems and share information about customers
  • fix the problem that bodies which could save other bodies money have no financial incentive to do so (through new reinvestment models and sharing savings)
  • are based on robust financial evidence and business cases.

Pilots' proposals and operational plans were finalised at the end of October 2012.    

The challenge and learning network

There are also 14 councils in a challenge and learning network:

  • Birmingham City Council
  • Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council
  • Cornwall Council
  • Durham County Council
  • Hertfordshire County Council
  • Lincolnshire County Council
  • Royal Borough of Greenwich
  • Harrow Council
  • Sheffield City Council
  • Shropshire Council
  • Sunderland City Council
  • Swindon Borough Council
  • Wiltshire Council
  • Worcestershire County Council

Ernst and Young's analysis of the pilots

The Local Government Association commissioned Ernst and Young to review the potential for the aggregation of whole place community budgets. The report notes that community budgets have the potential to deliver better outcomes and realise substantial financial benefits; with the potential of a net benefit of five years of between £9.4bn and £20.6bn.
Further information

To speak to an LGA officer about the whole place pilots please contact:

Email: john.wright@local.gov.uk

Dedicated community budget resource

Further information on whole place community budgets can be found on this dedicated website: http://communitybudgets.org.uk/

Whole Place community budgets – on the Knowledge Hub

15 May 2013

Resources

Whole place community budgets. Changing lives, saving money (PDF, 8 pages, 576 KB)

Whole Place Community Budgets website

To accompany the Guide to Whole Place Community Budgets the LGA with the Office for Public Management has designed and published an online resource. It includes much of the same content about the work of the four pilots and the learning they have generated, and enhances it with testimony from those involved in the form of quotes and video interviews. 

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