Improving Public Services

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)]

Too often people get passed around different public services rather than having their problems solved first time. This can be incredibly frustrating, wasting time and energy trying to track down the right people or repeating their story because services do not share information.

Councils account for a quarter of public spending and must play their part in finding sensible savings to help tackle the budget deficit inherited from the last Administration.

This Government know that joined-up services can save taxpayers’ money and that local authorities are best placed to help improve public services. This has been proven by the community budget pilots and the ground-breaking and extremely successful troubled families programme.

As a result, the troubled families programme will now be accelerated, with up to 40,000 additional families worked with a year earlier than planned. This will get more children back in school; cut youth crime and anti-social behaviour; put more parents on a path back to work; and deal with more problems in the home, such as domestic violence.

New figures today showed that over 100,000 families have now been identified as meeting the criteria for the programme, with councils actively working with more than 78,000 of them. Local authorities will be asked to submit expressions of interests to expand their programmes shortly.

On the back of this, I am announcing today a £410 million funding package and my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and I will also appoint a panel of experts to advise on how these kinds of local service reforms could be sped up to go further and faster.

The £410 million fund will reward authorities that cut duplication and build services around the needs of local people. £90 million of that will be distributed immediately to all councils so they can start investing to save.

The remaining £320 million will form a new transformation challenge award to be made available in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to areas with ambitious plans for improving services. This could be in health services to support elderly residents at home, rather than in hospital, getting people back into work or early learning for pre-school children. A prospectus for local authorities has been published today. The service transformation challenge panel will be drawn from independent experts from across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Building on the work of the public service transformation network, the panel will advise on what needs to happen locally and nationally to take advantage of more opportunities to go further and examine how to overcome barriers so that it can happen faster.

Resident satisfaction with council services has improved or been maintained since 2010 and these reforms will ensure that local authorities can continue to deliver the quality local services people deserve, while making the sensible savings we need to make as part of this Government’s long-term economic plan to secure our future.