Pilots pave way for community-based budgets

Author: Local Government Chronicle - Sep 30, 2010

Four councils have been testing the potential of so-called community-based budgets as part of a pilot programme being spearheaded by the coalition’s Big Society adviser Lord Wei, LGC has learned.

The pilot, which involves Barnsley MBC, Blackburn with Darwen BC, Cheshire West and Chester Council and Kingston upon Thames RBC, could lead to radical changes to the way funding is devolved and how communities engage with their public services, with the results expected to feed into the spending review.

The councils presented preliminary reports to Lord Wei, right, earlier this month, while the Department for Communities & Local Government is also playing a lead role.

The programme is based on the local integrated services (LIS) model, worked up by social enterprise Turning Point, which involves getting residents involved in designing and running their public services and pooling budgets at a community level.

Arguably the programme, which is at an early stage, gives the clearest indication yet of the role councils could play in the Big Society agenda.

Turning Point chief executive Lord Adebowale said the LIS model was not ‘volunteerism’ but involved engaging residents in their services and getting paid for it.

“There might be reductions in local government jobs but there’ll be an increase in opportunities in the community,” he told LGC. “I hope this will feed into the spending review. We’ve had encouraging noises from the government.”

Blackburn director of policy Tom Stannard said there had to be greater devolution of power to councils. “We want to get more bang for our buck by pooling budgets and giving people a greater say in the running and design of public services,” he said.

All four pilots have focused on deprived areas with about 10,000 residents. Barnsley chief executive Phil Coppard said: “We’ve been calculating the public money going into a deprived area with worklessness issues, and assessing which budgets could be pooled and which couldn’t.”

Kingston leader, Derek Osbourne (Lib Dem), said the council hoped to get a better understanding of resourcing going into one of its most deprived communities from a raft of public sector bodies and that they were using lessons learned from their neighbourhood budgets programme to develop thinking around place based budgets.

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