Battle lines drawn over community budget plans
Author: Michael Burton, the MJ |
The next phase of community budgets is set to be a key general election battleground as the main parties develop their strategies in the next few months for managing public services beyond 2015.
Labour leader Ed Miliband’s new innovation task force meets for the first time next week with community budgeting set to be the centre of Labour’s public sector strategy.
The Government has already rolled out its own community budgets network to develop lessons from the earlier whole place pilots and given more cash to its troubled families programme.
The Labour members of Mr Miliband’s new local government innovation commission, Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese; Stevenage BC leader Sharon Taylor, and Hackney LBC mayor Jules Pipe, chair of London Councils, meet in Stevenage on 1 August to plan for a place-based budgeting strategy.
When he announced their names last month Mr Miliband said their remit was to ‘to advise us on how we can make a difference even when there is less money around’ and added: ‘These leaders have led the way in their own communities and they will now help shape our plans for public services for the years ahead.’
The new task force, which will be expanded to include leaders of unitaries and counties, will be ‘radical’ according to member Sir Richard Leese.
In an interview with The MJ he said, referring to the lessons of the community budgets pilots of which Greater Manchester was one: ‘We know enough to end social determination. But this government hasn’t been ambitious enough and I would hope a Labour government in 2015 will demonstrate boldness and ambition on this agenda. In fact we ought to have a competition between the three main parties about which can be the boldest.’
He added: ‘We need to develop policies around place-based budgeting with services organised around people and places.’
Sir Richard said: ‘Local authorities don’t want to control budgets but just want a place-based decision-making structure. It might be at Greater Manchester level, or at council level, even family level where you need cross public sector investment decisions.
We have an idea of the shape these structures need to take and it’s in central government’s court to say it’s the right one and local government can get on with it.’
He said the commission’s task was first to produce proposals, then to work out the practicalities of implementing them. He said there would be a ‘position paper’ in September which will ‘be a call for evidence and not just from the usual suspects, with regional hearings.
Then there will be a clear policy proposal for the Labour Party next June/July very much centred on the community budget agenda. If we get buy-in there’ll be a second piece of work on what a Labour government can do to implement it.’