Investment partners

It is a lazy afternoon in Norbiton, south London, and the final hours of half-term are ticking away. But in Kingsmeadow Stadium, the home ground of AFC Wimbledon, the seeds of a public sector revolution are being sown.

Within the stadium, 50 people have gathered to discuss Norbiton and its future. On the surface, this meeting is unremarkable – a gathering of local residents peppered with local councillors and the odd council official. It is the kind of thing that councils across the UK organise time and time again.

Except this one has not been organised by the council. Instead, this meeting has been called by residents as a starting point for discussions about how the community can take advantage of the government’s desire to put localism to the test under its community budgets scheme.

Dean Tyler is the strategic partnership manager for Kingston, the London borough in which Norbiton sits. In the past, he might have been the man organising this type of event. But today he is a guest, here to say a few short words on behalf of the local authority. “They leafleted every household in Norbiton,” he says.

“Normally, if you want to get people to a public meeting, it would have to be specific: the closure of a hospital, antisocial behaviour in a park or a controversial planning application. But this was different – they came to talk about life in Norbiton and how it could be made better. Traditionally, the council would put together an event and get someone from the community to say a few words. This was the other way around.”

Tyler admits that 50 people is a fraction of Norbiton’s 10,000 residents, but it is twice the number of the 25 usual suspects who could be relied upon to turn up to such an event, and enough people to start building towards something bigger.

Neighbourhood pilots
Norbiton is one of 14 areas piloting community budgets, which aim to get public sector agencies to pool their money to improve services, save money and give local people more influence over government spending.

When he announced the community budget pilots last December, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles proclaimed: “These ‘pool and save’ pioneers can bring about truly local services with one big local cheque that knocks out bureaucratic processes everywhere and upends Whitehall’s monopoly over public money that’s hemmed in frontline workers for decades.”

Ten of the pilots are “neighbourhood-level” initiatives like the one in Norbiton; the remaining four are known as “whole-place” pilots and will seek to implement larger scale changes across local authority areas (see box, p27). The approach and the goals of this new initiative will sound familiar. It is not a far cry from Labour’s Total Place scheme and the New Deal for Communities regeneration programme, or the Cabinet Office’s more recent “local integrated services” model. But those involved with the community budget pilots are convinced that they could have significant implications for services used by children, young people and families.

“A lot of the original Total Place stuff was a bit academic,” says Mike More, chief executive of Westminster Council, which is involved in a joint west London whole-place pilot with Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea. “We knew that if you added in health services, local government, Jobcentre Plus and all the rest, it was always going to have a lot of noughts at the end. What really matters is re-enginnering the processes to see if there’s a better way of doing it.”

The government’s troubled families programme, which aims to support families with complex problems through a payment-by-results finance model, was the first focus of the community budgets concept. In 2011/12, 16 areas covering 28 local authorities were given the freedom to pool budgets as they saw fit, to try to best meet the needs of these families. Now every council in England has signed up to the troubled families programme.

The new wave of community budget pilots is looking at a wider set of issues. While all of them are still at a very early stage, many will examine how to change services that work with children, young people and families.

In Norbiton, local residents were concerned about a lack of youth activities and so there is now a sub-group of residents exploring that problem in more depth to figure out why it is an issue and what the community thinks should be done about it. What makes this approach different, says Kingston’s Tyler, is that youth activities was not on the council’s list of priorities for the area.

“Norbiton is our most deprived ward and life expectancy is seven years lower than in the other 16 wards in the borough,” he says. “But this is not about public sector professionals saying you have a problem with antisocial behaviour, low-level crime and low-life expectancy. When you talk to the community, they had very different priorities like housing, youth activities and income maximisation.”

Local priorities
In Birmingham, there are three neighbourhood community budget initiatives. In Castle Vale – an area with alcohol, drug and tobacco use that is above the average for the rest of the city – the focus is on improving people’s health. But in Shard End, an area with high unemployment and child poverty, the plan is to focus on issues such as securing jobs for young people and raising educational attainment.

Back in London, Westminster’s neighbourhood-level pilot in Queen’s Park is gearing up to grapple with serious youth violence with the help of the long-established community group Queen’s Park Forum. It is early days, and at the moment the focus is on planning, rethinking systems and mapping out what budgets could be pooled. But to get things moving, the council and the forum are experimenting with summer activities for young people.

“The borough has commissioned and delivered activities for young people each summer for as long as anyone can remember,” says James Thomas, director of family services at Westminster. “One idea that came out of the forum is to involve parents significantly more in some activities, which could mean putting on activities for parents or getting them involved as volunteers. It shows the value of neighbourhood-level pilots because they see the world differently from us sat within a local authority. So we’re going to try something different from the usual model where the parents’ role was to drop off their kids at the start and pick them up at the end. It’s tweaks at the moment rather than major redesigns, but it’s about seeing what we can do differently.”

For the wider whole-place pilot across west London, Westminster and its fellow west London boroughs are looking at a number of initiatives. These include a drive on educational attainment, with the aim to get 80 per cent of children leaving school with at least five A* to C grade GCSEs; and a drive to reduce youth violence. These are still in the early stages, but another strand of the west London pilot, which aims to speed up care proceedings, is further down the line.

The goal is to streamline the care proceedings process so that it takes an average of 24 weeks to go from the start of a case to its conclusion, instead of the current average of 60 weeks. More believes the results will show better outcomes for children and financial savings that could make it a model for implementation across the country.

The councils recruit a case manager who monitors all the cases and keeps things moving, while staff are required to produce prompt assessments to a set quality standard. The family courts, meanwhile, set aside specific times to hear family cases and agree to pay more attention to how timescales of cases are seen from the child’s viewpoint. It is a common sense recipe, but one that seemed more challenging at the outset.

Getting judges on board
“The absolute key was getting the judges on board,” says Thomas. “We hadn’t been used to having a close or collaborative dialogue with the judges. But now we’ve managed to do something about that.”

While getting judges and the councils together proved straightforward in the end, most of those involved with community budgets acknowledge that it is not always going to go smoothly. Organisations are not always going to be keen to release control of their budgets and sometimes a new approach will mean more spending by one agency, but benefits reaped by another. Then there is the reality of office politics. Will people happily surrender parts of their job or remit to others if that is deemed necessary?

“Relationships are key,” says Thomas. “It’s the people who work in those services who make it work, and you have to build trust between people and the services they represent if you are going to do anything differently and take risks. People can tend to get very rational about things and just look at budgets and organisational structures”

Prising budgets out of individual agencies is not just a local challenge. Ultimately, Whitehall will need to pool some of its money and allow public services more freedom to spend the funds if community budgets are going to have a major impact on children’s services. So it is a positive sign, says More, that the Department for Communities and Local Government has seconded civil servants to the whole-place pilot areas to work alongside local agencies.

“The old model tended to be that civil servants descended from on-high, came in for a meeting, judged and then went away,” he says. “What is good about this system is that it’s civil servants, local authorities and other partners working together. You’ve got people previously only in Whitehall departments getting out and seeing neighbourhoods and talking to the people affected, having much more enlightened discussions about how to improve the system. We’re also learning from them about methodologies and cost-benefit analysis.”

But with the government expecting to hear the outcomes of the pilots’ initial work by October, the pressure is on and this does present some challenges when making evaluations, says Dale Guest, the programme manager of the neighbourhood community budgets pilots at Birmingham City Council. Its Castle Vale pilot is focused on health, while its Balsall Heath pilot is looking at making the area cleaner and greener. “If you look at the cleaner, greener issue, you can do a quick clean up and two weeks later ask residents if it looks better. If it has, great. But with health, if you’re looking at infant mortality, you’re not going to be able to measure the difference in six or even 12 months,” he says.

Significant potential
While there are hurdles and, so far, only hints at how all this could transform children’s services, the potential is significant. It could touch every service working with under-25s and remodel how they work – not just borough to borough, but street to street. The government wants to make community budgets available to all areas of the country by April 2013. With the pilots still racing to meet the government’s tight deadlines, it is hard to predict what the results will be.

“We’re optimistic about what we can achieve locally and a little sceptical about whether or not it will really take off nationally,” says Tyler. “How much will central government departments really let go? The word ‘budget’ implies communities will have control over spending, but at a time when everybody’s budget is being squeezed, our ability to release control locally is hampered by our ability at national level to be discretionary about what we spend. I’m hoping that in a year’s time we will be met halfway by government, as it will need to let go centrally to enable us to let go to the community in turn.”

The focus right now, however, is how to unpick the various channels of public funding and how much of it is discretionary enough to be used in community budgets. Tyler says that figure could be a small proportion of the total due to the legal commitments and expectations services already have.

“For the sake of argument, it may well be that we, as a local group of partners in Norbiton, have only got 7.5 per cent control over the total that is spent,” he says. “I think we will identify small pots of money to give the community some control over the budget. I suspect we won’t achieve the big solution just yet, but hopefully we can get the system and the processes right to give us and the government something to build on.”