Empowered Communities With Neighbourhood Budgets Should Drive Early Intervention

New Report From Localis

Author: eGov Monitor - Oct 6, 2010

Community led early intervention programmes supported by government funding could transform our neighbourhoods and provide solutions to key social challenges argues a new report from Localis.

The research is based on a range of neighbourhood and early intervention initiatives in Birmingham. Using the experience of Birmingham, it advocates giving much greater power over public services to community groups and emphasises the need for a coherent structure to support both the necessary cuts to public spending and the implementation of the Big Society agenda.

Preventing problems early saves big money. Under Birmingham’s Brighter Futures programme various projects support children and young people in their local schools and neighbourhoods who are showing early signs of conduct disorder. Working with children under 10 is three times as successful as with older children and one project has demonstrated that it could save £97.3m over 15 years for an outlay of £2m. Currently the NHS spends 96% of its money on curing the sick and only 4% on helping people to be healthier – which means working with local communities.

Cllr Mike Whitby, Leader of Birmingham City Council says: “I very much welcome this report because it brings wider recognition to the tremendous wealth and diversity of community and voluntary organisations in Birmingham and the innovative work of the public services in the city, including the largest neighbourhood management programme in the country, covering 31 of our more deprived areas.

“All of this makes the city a real hotspot for the development of the Big Society. We will work closely with the Government to drive this forward - encouraging more volunteering, strengthening our community organisations and working together to tackle local issues more effectively. In our ‘Big Society, Big City prospectus’ we will explore ways to encourage 3,000 more local volunteers, get 100 more businesses involved in working with the community and find new ways of investing in community projects.

“If we are going to do more with less, it is vital that we concentrate on early intervention and work with communities to strengthen their capacity to address local issues. In the years to come we may have a smaller council, but we will have a Big City in every sense of the word."

Sir Michael Bichard, Senior Fellow and former Director at the Institute for Government, says: “The arrival of a new Coalition Government coupled with the now widespread acceptance that our governance system needs to change means that we have to quickly build on the Total Place thinking and lessons. This report seeks to do just that and is timely in describing the key components of this new approach.”

Barry Maginn, the report’s author says: “The potential of communities to take responsibility in service production must be acknowledged and a place-based outlook should be at the heart of the government’s approach. Key to the ‘Total Neighbourhood’ concept is a change of structures and mindset, away from the standardisation and silos that exist in the current system, and towards a more flexible, integrated and user-driven model of service provision. As part of this, community-led early intervention programmes, which have been shown to save money in the long run and also promote community cohesion, should be fostered through building a comprehensive evidence base of past initiatives to guide new programmes.”

The report concludes: “If implemented in their entirety, the recommendations laid down in this report offer the potential to solve many of the goals the current government has set itself…Achieving these goals will require a radical change in the state and in mindset. But in the current climate, is there any other option but to be radical?”

Other key conclusions of the report are:

· Where appropriate, local government should seek to pass power down to communities to allow services to be designed more closely around the user, and should support those communities by building capacity of community groups to take over the commissioning and running of services

· Central government should implement place-based budgeting, allowing localities to pool budgets and work across different agencies

· Local councils should look to create and share a pool of evidence for early intervention programmes, which over time could be supported by national government or a national agency.

· The introduction of ‘Local Outcome Bonds’ will allow local communities to raise capital for community-led projects, which combines public and private streams of money and provides private investors with a return on successful outcomes.

To read the original article click here

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