The Government is bringing back total place, with the expansion of the community budget pilots, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg told the Local Government Association conference in Birmingham today.
Mr Clegg revealed the government would be launching two pilot areas to take the scheme from the current 16 pilots covering families with multiple problems.
He told the conference:'Every Government preaches localism. This government will practice it.'
He added:'We will be putting community budgets at the heart of how we deliver services.'
The first pilot will see two areas'where we could design neighbourhood budgets' and the second would see 'two pilot local authority areas to pull all budgets for all public services'.
The expansion of the scheme has been greeted with enthusiasm at the conference. Harrow LBC chief executive Michael Lockwood told The MJ:'This is fantastic news. We challenged the government to be more ambitious about community budgets, and they are with this proposal.
'I had hoped they had more than two pilots.In Harrow we spend £2bn on public services supporting 147 buildings.Surely we can save a lot of money and improve services by doing it together.
'Harrow will be putting itself forward for this,' the winner of The MJ’s best achieving council award said.
