Joint Working: Lessons from total place

Cuts are coming thick and fast. Local government insiders predict council budget reductions of 15 to 20 per cent. But a scheme introduced under the Labour government could end up playing a big role in the new age of austerity.

Total Place was launched in the 2009 Budget and backed by the Treasury. The aim is to save money and improve delivery of local services, by taking what the Treasury calls "a whole-area approach to public services". Thirteen parts of the country, involving 63 councils, 34 primary care trusts and 13 police authorities, have for the past year piloted the ambitious scheme. In each place, the bodies spending public funds have come together to work out how much money is being spent across the locality and whether it could be better used. Top of their list has been removing duplication and waste. But another aspect is to redesign frontline services into multi-disciplinary teams that can nip problems in the bud. Each of the pilots received £250,000 for start-up costs and has focused on one or more specific themes, many relating to children's and youth services.

"The principle is easy to understand," says councillor David Parsons, chairman of the Local Government Association's improvement board. "You can either deal with public services downwards as silos, like health, or horizontally across a place." Parsons suggests that the savings may be so great that no frontline services need be cut.

Jon Rouse, chief executive of Croydon Council, believes Total Place is here to stay. "I think the coalition government will rebrand and fit it under the banner of the Big Society. They'll be bigging up the role of family and rebalancing it from the state to the third sector, but the core principles will remain."

Here, we find out where five of the 13 pilots have identified savings in children's services.

1. Manchester city region: One-stop-shops for children under five

Manchester's city region — which also incorporates Warrington — is the biggest pilot, taking in 11 council areas that represent £22bn of public investment. Its theme is children under five, and Sue Johnson, deputy chief executive of Wigan Council, the authority leading the pilot, says it is monitoring the cost-effectiveness of children's centres. "We hope to deliver everything but the baby at the children's centre, from immunisation to job training for parents."

But this doesn't come easily. If you are beefing up services into one-stop shops, that will mean discontinuing services elsewhere, she emphasises. Targeting resources is crucial. Families are ranked "thriving, coping, just coping or chaotic" with 85 per cent of funding currently going on the last group. The answer, she argues, is to spend a bit more money on the "just coping" category in order to shift them into "coping" and prevent more families from becoming "chaotic". Whether or not the coalition government gets behind Total Place, Johnson says, the approach is now ingrained in the area.

The Manchester city region believes £2m can be saved in early years provision for under-fives, and an extra £2m can be saved if they achieve a one per cent reduction in the number of children in care.

2. Croydon: Pre-emptive approach that begins before birth

Croydon's key focus for children is the prenatal to seven-years-old age range. Jon Rouse, chief executive of Croydon Council, says the pilot created single teams to deliver services in deprived areas. It has introduced innovations: Find Me Early, identifying mums-to-be who will struggle, and offering support; a digital "life passport" for disabled children that should prevent parents from having to hand over the same information repeatedly; an academy offering shared professional training in early years work; and an advocacy service to help families on the cusp of losing control. Rouse believes these measures will cut out duplication and save a lot of money by avoiding social breakdown.

But will Total Place simply lead to job losses? "Regardless of whether we do this or have a salami-slicing approach, there are going to be fewer jobs in the public sector," says Rouse. "The key thing is, are they the right jobs? At least this approach is putting science into it."

The pilot may be coming to an end, but Croydon is only at the start of an eightto 10-year journey, Rouse says. The next stage will see the creation of a programme management team to work with each of the cohorts and report to the children's trust.

Croydon estimates that its pre-emptive approach could provide savings of £8.4m by 2011/12 to 2013/14, and up to £61m by 2023/24. Rouse says the multi-agency, preventative approach has already been shown to work: the council has saved five per cent a year on its dementia spending by incorporating the same principles, and its Turnaround Centre, dealing with young people in trouble, has reduced by a quarter the numbers going into custody.

3. Bradford: A single gateway for young people leaving care or custody

Bradford has focused on young people who are either leaving care or custody. Vaughan Chapman, the pilot's lead for leaving care, is disarmingly frank about progress: "At the moment I haven't seen any savings." He talks of the need to invest to save in leaving care, which means creating a single gateway for services. "When someone leaves care we have identified everything they need in one go. We have to give these young people the gold-standard service," he says. So it means they'll have access to mental health specialists and benefits advisers in one place, rather than being expected to go out and find it all for themselves.

Bradford's work has included a review of more than half of offenders sentenced to less than 12 months in custody. They are not required to undergo supervision after release and currently have a reconviction rate of 60 per cent. Bradford has found that delays in restarting benefits after release creates pressures that make young people more likely to reoffend. The pilot believes the new approach will reduce reoffending rates by 10 per cent and save £4m.

There are still details to be worked out. Chapman speculates that in the case of custody it is a youth offending team worker's role to make it run in a streamlined way when a young person is released.

"I see no savings yet, but I do see potential for it in the long-term," he says.

4. Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire: Removing duplication

Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire's theme is to revamp children's and young people's services. The pilot has found that families are having too many similar assessments and public sector staff are spread over different buildings, when it would be better to have local integrated teams delivering frontline services. As a result, Mike Attwood, Total Place programme director, says the area's three children's trusts will collaborate more closely.

Another overlap exists in school improvement services. There are three across the pilot, but it would be more cost-effective and offer a wider knowledge base to bring these services together. Colleges offering courses to young people not in education, employment or training will need to join up their services, says Attwood. And central government needs to raise its game, because Connexions and Jobcentre Plus cannot share assessments.

Attwood says it is too early to give figures on savings, but adds that redundancies will not hit frontline staff, although there will be fewer chief executives and directors.

"If Total Place does anything, it's primarily about improving services. It means better joined-up assessments and more one-stop services. We value long-term staff and cannot afford to have lots of redundancies," he says.

5. Birmingham: Employing parenting techniques from overseas

Birmingham, which is looking at prevention and early intervention, chose to trawl the world for best practice. As a result, it is testing The Incredible Years programme from Seattle across nine children's centres in the city. The scheme aims to help parents of threeand four-year-olds to develop their parenting and social skills.

"It is incredibly cost-effective," says Cheryl Hopkins, who leads on prevention and early intervention at the Birmingham pilot. "For every dollar that goes in, three dollars come out, research shows. But you have to wait until they are young adults to reap the benefits; this isn't a quick fix."

Birmingham has also introduced the Triple P parenting scheme from Australia, along with a programme from Pennsylvania that will give children lessons in social literacy. The whole strategy will cost £41.7m over six years and Hopkins expects it to provide returns to the council of £102m over 15 years. "We have been very cautious because we are not sure that we will get the same cashable returns," Hopkins says.

The council has used Steve Aos, an economist from Washington State Institute for Public Policy, to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of its work, and he estimates that a return to all public services, not just council budgets, will be in the region of £400m.