[Ed Hammond]

I think I'm with the executive here (shock horror!) as a "minimum spend" is almost impossible to ascertain both for the reason indicated and because so many services are demand-led, making planning difficult.

Also, in many authorities, it is difficult to make the judgment because a spend on a discretionary service may serve to decrease the spend on a statutory service. For example, prevention work in healthcare is essentially discretionary but saves money from statutory social care and health functions of local authorities and their partners. And so on.

Another reason may be that in many instances it could be politically difficult to produce this in a public report - someone gets hold of it, gets the wrong end of the stick and the next thing you know it's "Council plans to take axe to public services".

[tim gilling]

It is always going to be tricky to define 'minimum' spend. Remember the Standard Spending Assessment formula that attempted to suggest what councils should be spending on services? And take for example the Secretary of State for Health's duty to 'promote a comprehensive health service' - people have been arguing about what the 'minimum' spend to meet that duty should be for years. And people regularly challenge in the courts whether decisions of councils to provide services in particular ways meet statutory requirements.

The OnePlace website and the Audit Commission's value for money profiles are probably a good place to start when seeking comparisons of the way different councils resource similar activities - but some additional research is needed to test 'demand' as Ed suggests and also the assumptions that councils (and partners) are making about demand and supply in their areas.

Many things are valued, by individuals and communities, that cannot be easily measured in economic terms. However, most decisions in the private, public and third sectors are based solely on costs and price. In the current financial climate decisions about 'efficiency savings' are likely to be driven along those lines. Social Return on Investment (SROI) may be a useful technique for measuring and accounting for a much broader concept of value. It incorporates social, environmental and economic costs and benefits into decision making, providing a fuller picture of how value is created or destroyed. The Cabinet Office has published a guide on SROI and I am thinking about publishing a guide for OSCs about it if CfPS can secure some funding.

[Dave Mckenna]

A very interesting question which will no doubt come more to the fore as time goes on.

For me the point is that organisations and individuals will make all sort of assumptions around these issues.

The role of scrutiny, therefore, is to:

a) Highlight that these are assumptions which vary from place to place

b)

[Dave Mckenna]

(as if nothing happened...)

b) Invite comparison with what others do

c) Draw out and challenge those assumptions - we are now in a world where our financial planning processes need to be reviewed at the deepest level - rather than just repeating what has happened at every previous annual budget round.

[Ed Hammond]

Another issue is the use of zero-based budgeting. When you're talking about "statutory spend", essentially what you're asking the department to do is to rebuild the budget from the ground up, as you do in zero-based budgeting.

Zero-base always seems like common sense. There's an obvious logic in challenging assumptions about what's being delivered. But not many authorities do it, because it's incredibly involved, complex and, oddly, very expensive too. This may be the reason for the reticence on the part of officers to embark on a similar exercise for scrutiny.

The Audit Commission, I think, did some research on this a while back because I can remember reading it, but I can't remember when this was or indeed the name of the publication!