Community Budgets

Nick Raynsford Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Brandon Lewis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention, which gives me a chance to highlight how this is a whole-Government approach. If he will bear with me, I will, in a few moments, outline how Departments are coming together to ensure that these things are being delivered, as appropriate to the local area.

The funding from the transformation challenge award will, to name just a handful of projects involved, help to improve children’s services in south-west London, integrate emergency services and speed up response times in Surrey, and reduce crime in Cheshire. We have announced various measures further to support transformation, including a £100 million new collaboration and efficiency transformation fund and new flexibility to allow £200 million of capital receipts to be spent on the one-off costs of service reforms. In addition, in 2015-16, £30 million will be available for fire service transformation, £50 million for police transformation and £100 million for innovation in education.

The whole-place community budget pilots also highlighted non-financial barriers to partnership working, such as difficulties of data sharing, as the Select Committee Chairman rightly mentioned. I share his concerns about and frustration at the potential for real progress and change to be blocked in that way. I am determined that this Government will find a way through these myriad difficulties. Historic breakthroughs have been made in data sharing by the Troubled Families programme, for example, through which Department for Work and Pensions data have been safely shared with local authorities. Barriers to data sharing are as much to do with people’s perception of legislation as the legislation itself. For example, the “Data Sharing Act” might have been a better name for the Data Protection Act 1998. In working with fire and rescue authorities, which do great work in their communities, we often find that we need to weed out mythical understanding of something in that Act which somebody in a particular authority has found, to ensure that we get data sharing working correctly.

[Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

Might I share with the Minister my experience a week ago, when visiting staff at an early years centre in Greenwich? They spoke movingly about the difficulties they had in getting information that they desperately need about certain families from the mental health trust in the area. After talking to the mental health trust about that, to try to overcome this blockage, it became clear that the Minister’s point is exactly right: there are different understandings of what data protection requires, and there certainly is a long way to go to get different organisations to accept that sharing responsibly and within the ambit of the data protection rules is essential to getting good quality services, and to protecting people.

[Brandon Lewis]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, and I have had experience of this. One really good example of data sharing involves Cheshire fire authority, which has put a lot of time and effort into breaking down barriers, getting to the root of what really can be done, and getting on with it. It is useful in a debate such as this for Members from all parties to spread the word—when people read Hansard as bedtime reading, or over the weekend—so that people appreciate that such things can be done if they want to do them. The Act needs to be read properly, so that it is not misunderstood or misinterpreted by anybody in an authority.

Little things, simple things, can make a difference. In Hertfordshire, a group of people consisting of representatives from the fire authority, the county council, the police and social services works together in the same room. That has broken down barriers and has got through to people, enabling them to understand things better and allowing for much better data sharing.

Whether barriers are real or imagined, we have committed to improve data sharing where it will improve services for residents. We are setting up a centre of excellence for information sharing and exploring options for legislative changes.

The pilots also told us that their attempts to work with partners were sometimes hindered, as Members have outlined, by uncertainty about future funding. As a result of these concerns, the Treasury is working with Departments to give local public services the same long-term indicative budgets as Departments, from the next spending review. One key characteristic of the whole-place community budget pilots—why they succeeded where past attempts did not succeed as well, or failed—was the close co-operation between central and local government. As the Select Committee’s report makes clear and as the hon. Member for Corby said, the pilot areas highlighted the importance of Whitehall secondees working alongside them, helping to change the way central and local government work together, and helping to bridge understanding of how both sides work.