The Total Place initiative has all been attempted before; the odd thing is how little Whitehall has learned from those previous attempts.
The basic idea is to identify all public resources being deployed in 13 pilot areas and then spend an extra £5m to see how they can be better managed. This is hardly a new idea - and indeed I myself played a part in prompting the first "total approach" way back in the 1972 budget debate.
Peter (now Lord) Walker then designated six cities where we would examine the "total resources" deployed and "how to transform them". But one problem was gaining enough interdepartmental cooperation in Whitehall. And, as with the present initiative, the lead department did not clearly identify all the main policy issues. Now, as before, the pilot areas can chose different themes under the familiar Whitehall formula; we spend some money and we learn something!
And the irony is that the main unresolved tasks are the same as in 1972, though more critical after four decades of evasion.
Relevant questions then, as now, were:
• how to build in a clearer constituency dimension to our macro economic management
• how to ensure better Whitehall coordination and a systematic linkage between public audit and actual spending at national and local levels
• how best to finance our local authorities
• how to ensure fair local taxation and revaluations
• how to deal openly with disparities in local tax yield
• how to encourage local economic environments in a way that improves real incomes
• how to finance exceptional priority tasks that lie beyond local fiscal resources?
'Local budgetary haze'
None of these tasks were attempted or later resolved. So the problems of coordination continued and were further complicated by centralisation and the vast array of quangos, central agencies and outsourced or privatised services; the now familiar "local budgetary haze".
I was defeated by lack of ministerial continuity and Whitehall's endemic problems of coordination. Ministers still want to play with the ball themselves and this and the deeper problems will continue until we have "external" (ie parliamentary) validation of our spending plans.
But Total Place itself should survive the election. Who can doubt the appeal of its first objective – to record all public money spent locally?
Given all the above obstacles that's precisely why I set up a team in 1984 to do this across the whole of England. That was before the days of the internet but we accessed all the relevant Whitehall divisions and made local outputs accessible over the vast range of domestic programmes. With this cooperation, and with help from the House of Commons library, we supplied online or hard copy data to anyone, showing who gets what, where.
This service covered the years 1984 and 1985. The Northern Ireland Office lent officials from their departments to arrange a one-year coverage of the province. The Welsh secretary welcomed the same system to Wales and there was then agreement at official level to do the same for Scotland. But then it all crashed.
In 1986 Michael Heseltine, at the then Department for Trade and Industry, published his Tradeable Information Guidelines that required the maximum commercial return from all tradeable official data.
Immediately the diverse Whitehall divisions began seeking agreements with commercial information providers - and then, too, some government agencies began to rely on marketing public data as a source of income. There was simply no longer a way to secure access to, and usage of, the wide range of information required for a "total" view of what goes on in any area, or relative to other areas.
Transparency remained generally unwelcome at policy directing levels – with ministers even advised that rational extensions of public audit could discourage the private sector. Even Freedom of Information legislation avoided effective provision for the proactive dissemination of information, although this widens the gap between the information rich and the information poor. So my case for the inclusion of public sector spending and outputs in our official geographical information systems was consistently resisted.
This May, the new EU Inspire directive removed all such obstacles – and this goes to parliament next month. With this, and an Ordnance Survey "location strategy", there is no longer a reason to limit Total Place initiatives to 13 pilot areas. Now we can all have a go.
Of course the £5m budget provides consultants for official pilot areas. But it is nonsense to pretend the professional expertise is rocket science or that local professionals lack the essential skills.
Moreover this is now the age of local sourcing, so I hope Tom Steinberg and his MySociety organisation can get busy on this and really open up the debate for radical action.
The crucial challenge is to open the debate everywhere at all times and at all levels. It means the mass of people really participating, testing main programme policy innovations and really seeing "who gets what". That is what I would call a "total approach".
Des McConaghy is a former civil servant
