Enabling public sector bodies to share budgets will be "absolutely critical" to further reform of public services, according to the government.
At the launch of a joint report by the Cabinet Office and the Treasury on public services in the rest of the world, Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury and minister for public service reform, said there will be a "slower rate" of public spending growth in the years ahead and further reform of public services will require even more innovative approaches and changes in the relationship between both citizens and the state and between central government and frontline staff delivering services.
Presenting the report, Ben Jupp, director of public services strategy and innovation at the Cabinet Office, said two factors for success were clear from the examples of public initiatives from other countries. "Two things were repeated time and again," he said. "Things work best when responsibility is in the hands of a single lead professional to look at a problem and where agencies manage to pool their budgets."
Jupp cited the example of the Wraparound Milwaukee project, included in the report, where a single lead professional works with children with mental illness. There is evidence that this can lead to "significant savings", said Jupp.
The use of lead professionals is being tried in different parts of the UK public sector: earlier this year, for instance, the Ministry of Justice said it was looking at ways to explore how budget-holding lead professionals might be developed in offender management.
A Cabinet Office paper earlier this year suggested offender management could be integrated in this way with other services, including employment, education, housing support and drug and alcohol services.
A similar approach has been tried out in children's services and the evidence suggests such lead professionals can successfully commission a range of services from providers in a joined-up way. But Jupp said that if such an approach is to work, central government departments would have to give up some control. Otherwise, he said, "we're just playing around at the edges".
Chris Ham, professor of health policy and management at the University of Birmingham, welcomed the idea of a "new professionalism" in public services, with staff in different areas coming together to run joint services, but said existing public sector employment structures are still a barrier to further development of such projects.
