Total Place: Can't share, won't share?

After Total Place, what then? Though it might seem premature, attention is already beginning to focus on how, if at all, its recommendations will be forced on local bodies. Though ostensibly about improving local services, Total Place has been caught up in the relentless search for public spending cuts. That creates a dilemma for parties wanting to save money without wrecking their localist credentials: enforce collaboration, or not? The assumption is that if local bodies work together, they will find savings. Claire Kober, the Labour leader of Haringey council in north London, says the last decade was all about seeking efficiencies within individual organisations. "The next decade," she says, "is about taking the thinking from Total Place and looking at [how to get] efficiencies across organisations." But some local bodies, for whatever reason, won't want to play nicely with their neighbours and peers. So what would the government do, if it believes it can't achieve savings it has promised the public without precisely that collaboration? The present government is still considering its response to the Total Place pilots, and won't respond officially until the budget expected in March. The Conservatives, for their part, insist that local collaboration will come about as a matter of course. One of their shadow Treasury ministers, Philip Hammond, said recent: "The pressure to do more with less, and transparency, will drive decision-making at the local level. "Of course it is possible that local authorities will have no part in that - [that] they are going to cut services rather than hunt efficiency gains. Our job then is simply to make sure democracy holds them to account." Susan Williams, the former Conservative leader of Trafford council and a parliamentary candidate for Bolton West, agrees. Collaboration is "not something that you would force upon people ... it's going to be up to local councils on how they wish to work together." Enforcement process Others are more sceptical of such relaxed noises. Chris Leslie, the director of the New Local Government Network thinktank, says ministers "will be bound to have some sort of [enforcement] process. If they [councils] don't budge in the way they want them to budge, it will be too difficult for them to achieve the savings they want." The "danger" of the Total Place process, he says, is that the government will start giving "very crude instructions" to enforce collaboration. To do so would be to miss all kinds of local sensitivities: for example, that councils might want to work with other councils of a similar size and nature, not just their nearest neighbours. Better, then, to provide incentives for collaboration - but perhaps not in the current way. At the moment, the reward for councils delivering services more cheaply one year is often a reduced budget next time around, Leslie says. Different incentives could involve giving out local grants only in exchange for performance above the average - effectively saying, "if you are overly expensive in your services, you are not going to keep that money", as he puts it. Or ministers could require local bodies to give up a percentage of their grant to an overarching body such as a local strategic partnership, forcing them to take budget-pooling seriously. It would still be trampling on local autonomy, Leslie admits. But, he says: "If that's where the money comes from, it's the lever they [government] will have to use." Williams acknowledges that the implication of not working together is that councils "would have to find different ways of cost saving". Central government may not crudely push local councils together, in other words - but falling grants will do the job anyway.