Total Place: give it more time says Bichard

Today's Total Place report should be seen as "more than just a set of pilots" according to the chief architect of the innovative programme. Sir Michael Bichard, director of the Institute for Government thinktank and influential former permanent secretary, who has been driving forward the Total Place programme since it was announced in last year's operational efficiency programme final report , says there has been a lot of misunderstanding about Total Place. "This is not about saying that Total Place will only have succeeded if we have 170 pilots by 2011," comments Bichard. "It's about trying to get people to work and behave differently. That is how it will have to be judged." This morning the government will release the headline findings from the 13 Total Place pilots alongside the budget and the full report will be published tomorrow. Several issues that are likely to be raised, including whether the pilot schemes have been sufficiently rigorous in identifying potential savings . On this, Bichard acknowledges that there is more work to do and that not all of the 13 pilot areas have "quite fleshed out" the possible deliverable savings. Changing public services But Bichard adds that changing public services in this way cannot happen overnight. "Total Place has been around for less than a year. People having been thinking about this whole problem for 10 years," he comments. "The Smarter Government report made it clear that the government was going to tackle this and I anticipate something in the Budget about all of this. That's not bad. But it will take much longer than a year to do something meaningful." Bichard adds that the whole project is in danger of falling foul of what might be called the Monty Python effect, with too many conversations on Total Place getting a bit like asking what the Romans did for us, as in the comedians' film, Life of Brian. Yesterday, a report from thinktank Public Services Trust 2020 proposed a new government "superdepartment" for devolved government, with one single aim: to move all relevant powers on service delivery and improvement from Whitehall to localities. It also called for a new kind of balance between power and funding, with localities able to ask for lower "single area" funding in exchange for the power to bring together more agencies and public services. In some areas, this is already happening. "This is a developing story," says Bichard.