Communities and Local Government

• Local government
• Efficiency and better services
• Total Place programme

Local government

Total Place programme

Budget 2009 announced the beginning of the Total Place programme in response to Sir Michael Bichard's work on local incentives and empowerment within the Operational Efficiency Programme.

Total Place is an ambitious approach to considering how a "whole area" approach to public services can lead to better services for the customer at less cost. It seeks to reduce costs and introduce new ways of working, through collaboration and local leadership, within the context of constrained resources and public expectations of higher quality services. It builds on a background of efficiency work across many sectors and places.

Total Place also ties in with the Building Britain's Future agenda of building the next generation of public services, in which front-line delivery organisations collaborate effectively to deliver more user-focused services and individual entitlements.

There will be opportunity for areas to look outside existing structures and processes to identify what is needed there and to find innovative approaches to delivering that. To be ready to change, not just the delivery of services on the ground, from the frontline to Whitehall - through which those services are delivered.

Thirteen pilots are using tools to identify where these changes should happen - specifically a 'supply-side' mapping exercise to show how existing money is spent in the area, and 'demand-side' customer analysis to show the existing and future needs of the people who will use these services.

The pilot areas will be managed by the Leadership Centre (external link).

The Communities and Local Government backed programme will look at public spending and local leadership in the 13 areas across the UK.

Pilot areas will be going through the following process:

• Mapping public spending in an area to understand how this relates to local outcomes.
• Identifying the 'customers' in that area: what do they need?
• And, having homed in on a particular theme, to examine potential gains from redesigning services focussed on customers and to identify barriers in local and national delivery structures that prevent areas delivering better services at less cost.

The 13 pilot areas have been selected based on a set of criteria, including at least one per region, variety of delivery vehicles (single tier, two-tier, multi-area agreement groups, city-region), sufficient size to offer significant savings, and good leadership.

The pilot areas are:

• Birmingham
• Bradford
• Coventry and Solihull
• Croydon
• Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole
• Durham
• Greater Manchester city-region and Warrington
• Leicestershire and Leicester City
• Lewisham
• Luton and Central Bedfordshire
• South Tyneside, Gateshead and Sunderland
• Worcestershire
• Kent

The programme interfaces with other local areas beyond the 13 official pilot areas that are undertaking similar work, for example, Barnet, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk.

For further enquiries please contact: total.place@communities.gsi.gov.uk.