I have to say, having read it, the top headline is it’s a painful time for pretty much everyone.  And there seems to be a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul (or the other way around).   These come in the guise of efficiency and value for money.  I’m sure there probably are some genuine efficiency and value for money savings out there (such as reducing spending on consultants by central government), but some of them are definitely phoney (such as the shared central government back office contact centre thingy – or whatever it’s called – presumably so designed just to drive anyone wanting to phone the civil service completely mad).  Apparently it’s all called ‘Smarter Government’.  Seems a bit like an oxymoron.   

And at a time when everyone is feeling miserable – they go and increase duty on alcohol – so we can’t even drown our sorrows in a glass of wine (or two).  I know, I know, the health benefits blah, blah, blah.  But what the government has failed to realise is that people are drinking to try and be happier.  If they did other things that made us happier, we’d drink less.  Such as enabling people to have more say and ownership over their lives and their neighbourhoods.  I think just about everyone is fed up of nanny state-ism.  And yes, I’m well aware that drink doesn’t make you happier – but it does for a little while anyway.  And what you know and what you feel can be two entirely different things. 

But I stray from the point.  I think possibly the only good news is for first time buyers – if there are any. 

 But squirreled away on page 98 (of several hundred pages) is a box about Total Place.  We’ve all been hearing about Total Place for a while now, but to be honest, I’m not really sure how many people have actually got their heads around it.  In a bid to try and help my poor head, I went to an IDeA conference on Total Place for the third sector on Tuesday.  To be honest, most of what was said didn’t directly relate to anything we were doing, but I did come away feeling like I understood it better and where possibly PB might fit in. 

All the speakers there were anxious that we know that Total Place isn’t just about efficiency savings.  In fact, it’s supposedly primarily about giving people a say over their local areas and tailoring services to local needs.  Which is funny, as that’s exactly what we’ve been saying for years.  But at least we’re all on the same page.  Key to that is involving people.  And this is where I think PB comes in.  It’s a very good tool for involving people and giving them a direct say over what happens in their local area and enables services to be targeted more effectively.  PB can help facilitate the main aim of Total Place. 

If we go back to that box on page 98, then we’ll also see that although Total Place is about identifying duplication and being more efficient (and hence saving money) – central government doesn’t intend to take all the money that’s saved through Total Place back.  Which is a good thing – if they do what they say.  And some of that money that’s not clawed back can be reallocated locally as determined by citizen priorities through PB!  Plus with all that information about budgets and what’s being spent in the area flying around, we can throw in some citizen budget literacy at the same time.

See, a nice neat circle, where PB ties Total Place up with a bow.  Of course, in reality, it’s unlikely to work quite like that.  But, we can promote the idea and encourage areas to give it a go. 

So yes, it’s a difficult time.  We all knew that it would be.  It will be painful.  There might even be more drinking, despite the extra duty (except for the poor Cornish farmers who now can’t afford their own cider).  But, the best way to get through it is to involve everyone, share responsibility and ownership, build trust and accountability – all of which is what PB does very well.  We might even have some empirical evidence to start proving it soon! 

Could we see a way to clearly link participation by residents and a vibrant third sector? The report, Commissioning and the Community Sector by The Kindle Partnership — which incorporates Action with Communities in Rural England, BASSAC, Children England, Community Matters, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services — has been published because it says community groups are often reluctant to get involved in commissioning because they lack information about the process and the risks involved. (see more at http://www.cypnow.co.uk/bulletins/Daily-Bulletin/news/990696 )

Their guide offers much useful advice and guidance to enable public money to be accessed by community level organisations. And this made me think- this is what PB does as well. Through the many community grants processes we have seen small local organisations pick up funding that would otherwise be unavailable to them. When a community comes together to decide funding almost invariably they know who can deliver locally, and they want to back local solutions.

This relates (in my view) to a much older paper by the New Economics Foundation called “Plugging the leaks”, which identified how public spending can leak out of an area through consultancies, by purchasing outside the district, or employing the wrong delivery model. It persuasively argues that if money can be made to circulate within the local economy, rather than leak out of it, you can generate a useful multiplier effect. Every pound of public money can generate extra resources again and again and again, creating jobs and stimulating the local economy. Bottom up regeneration of this kind is much more sustainable and leaves a local legacy. (See http://www.pluggingtheleaks.org/)

Yet public sector commissioning is structured in a way that makes it unobtainable where its most needed. The Social Enterprise Coalition has been especially exercised about commissioning and it’s answer is more collaboration. Its encouraging smaller organisations to build partnerships to access these big contracts. The problem is the sector is ill prepared for the sort of hurdles put in place by our public procurement rules which seem designed to favour the private sector on price over better public or social economy outcomes. Also partnership can lead to mission creep and inefficiency as new ways of working must be re-created. Charity trustees are rightly worried they are being transformed by external forces to do government’s work and losing money and autonomy in the process.

NCVO, BASSAC, the Development Trusts Association and others in the social economy will also recognise this issue. The shrinking of core grants for the community and voluntary sector has caused huge damage, with extra burdens on charities and the smaller local community enterprises. There is a well recognised funding gap opening up, with the voluntary sector effectively subsidising the public sector rather than the other way round.    Carers for example are filling a gap in local health and wellbeing funding, and by doing so save the NHS and therefore all taxpayers millions. Yet individual carers remain in extreme need.    This sort of injustice will only get worse in the coming tight fiscal years.

So how does PB connect to this gloomy picture. Well, in numerous PB events the community now targets thousands of pounds locally into filling just this gap. Community nurseries, personal support services, youth clubs, exercise groups, environmental improvement schemes all do well when the community decides.
As PB has spread the opportunity grows and grows for spending money in communities through some kind of a local decision day. For example there is Newcastle’s Carers UDecide process. Where carers are being put in charge of a significant budget to create the services they need to do their work.    And in Tower Hamlets their PB process this year included new information, bringing a new option to buy top up service investments from the third sector or from the council.

Of course if money available to community enterprises is to grow, so must the robustness behind any decision making process. But part of the answer is already out there, through a new phase of PB using commissioning tables and community contracts. Well known overseas, a budget matrix can begin to provide the rigor that commissioners need to invest in local enterprise.

And that will be good for all. Good commissioning is about connecting local knowledge with technical expertise in new forms of co-production. Procuring the right services at a small scale by tapping into resources already within the community is a sensible strategy. PB does this very well. I think it would end up saving money by more efficient and innovative local delivery. Bringing transparency over how commissioning works, and strengthening local accountability over precious taxpayers money. PB could yet again be a “win, win, win” scenario.

  http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/uploadedFiles/NCVO/What_we_do/Research/Almanac/NCVO_2009_The_State_and_the_Voluntary_Sector.pdf) 

http://www.carersuk.org/Newsandcampaigns/News/1244212361
http://community.newcastle.gov.uk/udecide/?p=27

Probably it’s also sense that a phoney war is on, as we head towards a May election. This brings its challenges as so much seems to be in holding mode. New policies like the Sustainable Communities Act seem to be on hold or just out of reach, though it has some life as a private members bill. There is despondency around in a lot of organisations supporting community empowerment too, about possible public sector cuts. Might the future for PB be bleak, with little money for residents to be able to influence, and departments looking for cuts, not investments?

On the other hand quite senior figures from all political parties have expressed support for PB in some way. Only recently I was at a conference in London, and two opposition speakers (Tory and Lib-dem) with an interest in community engagement both mentioned PB in a positive light. We have counted as many PB pilots in Conservative councils as in Labour ones doing PB, with the Lib dems also getting the PB story. We still see a healthy number of new experiences coming on stream.

PB is certainly somewhere on political radar. Politicians are aware that public spending cuts ahead mean some unpopular decisions, so may hope PB will help take the nasty taste away. A more cynical view would be that they are wanting to pass responsibility on to electors for those tough decisions. Or as a way to flatter the population at a time when civil servants and politicians are particularly disrespected after lots of bad news stories, such as the MP’s expenses scandals, bankers’ bail-outs and bonuses, the farce of the Copenhagen summit, the housing market bumping along the bottom, and pensions shortfalls. All of this is against the background of a recession where the rich seem to have survived best of all.

On a more positive note the organisers of the conference mentioned above, report growing interest in PB and that it’s a frequently suggested topic for future conferences. We at the PB Unit have seen interest from departments other than Communities and Local Government, and from statutory or public bodies like health authorities, police forces and housing bodies. There are signs of it expanding outside the narrow confines of England too. The Welsh Assembly has recently decided on using PB in schools as part of their review of children’s rights, and have committed £240,000 to produce new resources to make that happen. The Unit is working in Scotland too now. I could go on.

The challenge for the PB Unit is to continue focussing on trying to deepen PB experiences, with added attention on service design, commissioning, and larger mainstream budgets that are open to influence. Nor to forget benefits from improving community understanding and better deliberation.

PB’s still pretty new in the UK and there are lots of ways it could go. Painting a clear vision of where we might be next year, let alone who will be in the parliament after the election is difficult, but I don’t yet perceive our work is done. There is no turning back now, as PB is here to stay.