Scrutiny and Total Place

Last updated:13 July 2010

Total Place, or “the Programme formerly known as Total Place” as we may now need to call it, was the former government’s attempt to “deliver better services at less cost, through effective collaboration between local organisations and leadership”. To date it has involved thirteen pilot areas investigating potential options for making operational efficiencies, focusing often on customer insight and experience and highlighting the need for significant changes in how funding and service delivery streams and performance management reporting flow back and forth from Whitehall to localities.

Despite a probable name change, it seems likely that the potential for savings offered by Total Place (or the PFKATP) means that the new government will continue a similar approach. Accordingly the Centre for Public Scrutiny (CfPS) has been doing some investigating of its own, to examine how effectively the government and the pilots have integrated accountability and scrutiny into their new models of service delivery.

The first thing to say is that the pilots are very different and have approached their experiments and analysis in very different ways. However, what they have in common is treating accountability and governance issues as an afterthought. Two of the pilot reports make no mention of accountability issues at all. Many discuss it only in terms of managerial accountability and programme management, with occasional references to the barrier to effective joint working presented by current arrangements involving accountability to Whitehall and ministers.

This may simply be a result of their work being at an early stage, focusing mainly on data capture and analysis of current funding and performance management streams, and only starting to think about new service delivery models. For the future, however, we would suggest that there are three key reasons for governance to move centre stage, and for scrutiny to have a role in future arrangements. These reasons are based on the three pillars of a strong and effective democracy which we identify in our recent publication, “Accountability Works!” – involvement, accountability and transparency.

Firstly, the implications of some of the Total Place proposals are significant in many areas and may lead to public controversy. In Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole, for example, the need to reduce secondary health services for older people in order to invest more in preventative work to enable them to live independently at home for longer, is highlighted as potentially politically controversial. It will be important to find mechanisms for the public to be involved, to understand the arguments for change and to have clear decision-making processes that are transparent and seen to be fair and open.

There is a danger if this is not done of public outcry once decisions are announced and public pressure to change decisions or consult further, delaying or derailing implementation and reducing the potential savings to be achieved. Having been through the experience as an elected member in Hackney of having to make £70m savings in-year on a then £280m budget (as a result of the authority’s own catastrophic failures rather than a national economic crisis), I can testify to the need to find ways to manage public concern. Hackney’s experience of ‘managing’ it through the deployment of 400 riot police to protect councillors as we set an emergency budget following our S114 notice is not ideal!

Viewed through a more positive prism, scrutiny offers a further way of capturing customer insight and experience. One of our shortlisted entries to the 2010 Good Scrutiny Awards demonstrates the value in both financial and human terms of effective scrutiny based on listening to the public and identifying alternative ways of delivering a service.

Warrington Borough Council’s review of cemetery provision arose from public concerns about the poor state of one of their cemeteries and it identified how investing £85k in better maintenance would avoid the need for £1m+ expenditure on a new cemetery. Bereaved families were involved in the review and identifying improvements to be made and a new “Friends” group was set up to provide ongoing public involvement.

Secondly, many of the Total Place proposals involve a reduction of central government direction, ring-fenced funding, performance reporting and other accountability mechanisms. Essentially what is proposed is less upwards accountability, and it needs to be replaced with more – and simpler – outwards accountability to local communities. Birmingham’s Total Place pilot has the ambition of developing a single “Budget for Birmingham” and cites confused accountability as a potential barrier to its success. The Treasury’s national report on Total Place also argues that “the inconsistency, and sometimes complexity, of accountability for local agencies works against collective decision-making”.

These are arguments made by CfPS in “Accountability Works!”, in which we argue that there are many different forms of accountability and we need to move from a hierarchy, where some are seen as more important to decision-makers than others, to a web, where they potentially all have a role to play in different degrees and where they need to interact more constructively and clearly. We identified, for example, accountability…:

…Through the ballot box
…Through the media
…Individually through the market and consumer choice or complaints
…Through regulation, inspection and audit
…Through internal management processes
…And through scrutiny carried out by lay non-executives
 
Total Place gives these arguments additional force, since it proposes more of a joined-up “web” of local decision-making, than a hierarchy, where accountability upwards through regulation, inspection and performance management trumps all other forms. It is therefore of concern that so little attention seems to have been paid to accountability in most of the pilots, and it needs to be a focus in the next steps that are being taken.

Finally, the new government places great store by transparency, with recent proposals to publish salaries and contract values over a certain level, and new obligations on local authorities, for example, to publish all items of expenditure over £500. They see this as having the potential to open up government and decision-making to an “army of armchair auditors”, as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, has put it. But if more decisions are made and funding allocated through partnerships, there is a danger that we end up with even less transparency and a lack of clear lines of responsibility.

Previous academic research has highlighted the governance weaknesses of partnership arrangements and how they fall down on openness, public access, member conduct and other standards. Most of the pilots have based their Total Place work around their existing local strategic partnerships but only a few mention the need to strengthen the governance of these going forward (Bradford for example). CfPS has long argued for more involvement of scrutiny members in partnership decision-making, to provide a connection with the democratic process and a public forum in which proposals can be examined, challenged and tested, and the public and service users’ views brought to bear.

Some in local government have already been thinking about accountability and exploring innovative governance structures, often using new forms of collective scrutiny:

• The Association of Greater Manchester Authorities have set up a joint scrutiny pool of elected members to hold the new AGMA joint executive committee to account;
• Several authorities, including Bracknell Forest, Cardiff and Torbay have piloted scrutiny arrangements involving non-executives from a range of partners in order to hold their executive partnership structures to account;
• Hertfordshire have used the ‘World Café’ methodology to discuss budget priorities with councillors, officers and partners.

There are therefore many opportunities to improve involvement, accountability and transparency in local decision-making, and all are given additional force by the drive to a Total Place way of joining up services. Should anyone be any doubt about this, the recent Corporate Governance Inspection report for Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council provides an excellent and salutary reminder of why good governance matters:

“Good governance is about running things properly. It is the means by which a public authority shows it is taking decisions for the good of the people of the area, in a fair, equitable and open way. It also requires standards of behaviour that support good decision making – collective and individual integrity, openness and honesty. It is the foundation for the delivery of good quality services that meet all local people’s needs. It is fundamental to showing public money is well spent. Without good governance councils will struggle to improve services when they perform poorly.”

Jessica Crowe, Executive Director, CfPS