Local government

Community Budgets

What is a Community Budget?

A Community Budget gives local public service partners the freedom to work together to redesign services around the needs of citizens, improving outcomes, reducing duplication and waste and and so saving significant sums of public money.

Too often a resident's experience of local public services is one of frustration at the complexity, fragmentation and difficulty finding a way through the bureaucracy. In too many places inequalities in access to good services have left our society less fair, exacerbated by control from Whitehall that has created uncoordinated, inefficient and unnecessarily expensive public service silos. Delivering excellent, joined up, services to people must be our goal. The Community Budget approach is a powerful new way to address this.

A successful Community Budget will be able to deliver a better service to residents because it can:

  • make better use of its resources, including pooling the budgets of all agencies where it is effective to do so, including local knowledge, community assets and voluntary effort
  • remove central rules and regulations so local professionals can deliver better services by redesigning them so delivery is more effective for residents
  • give people greater control over their local public services
  • establish appropriate local partnership and governance arrangements to create a unified approach that suits their area.

Community Budget Implementation

The initial focus on troubled families

The Spending Review 2010 announced that 16 areas (28 authorities - 20 per cent of English councils) would develop proposals to turn around the lives of families with multiple problems using the Community Budget approach. After less than six months, on 1 April 2011, they began implementing plans to deal with at least 10,000 problem families.

In the process of developing Community Budgets, these areas were instrumental in identifing and tackling a range of potential barriers to joint working between local agencies:

  • specific barriers, such as the flexibility for agencies to pool budgets, were addressed by the Whitehall Champions working with the 16 areas
  • more generic barriers, such as data sharing, were tackled by the Community Budget areas working in a group chaired by Baroness Hanham.

The Baroness Hanham group produced a number of tools that other areas should find useful when developing a Community Budget. These can be found through the 'Online Learning Resource' on the Local Government Association's Community Budgets website (see 'On other sites', top right).

The activity of the 16 areas helped inspire more than 70 further areas to express an interest in developing similar approaches in response to the Deputy Prime Minister's invitation of 28 June 2011 (see 'On this site', top right).

Work on families is now being taken forward by the new Troubled Families Team in the Department for Communities and Local Government (see 'On this site' top right).

Community Budget Prospectus

The Community Budgets Prospectus launched on 17 October 2011, invited areas to express an interest in taking forward Whole-Place or Neighbourhood-Level Community Budgets pilots. It also set out how the pilots would be short listed, then selected, and included details of the offer made to pilots (see 'Related Publications' below).

Whole-Place Community Budgets

Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles announced on 21 December 2011 that the Whole-Place Community Budget pilots (see 'On this site', top right) are:

  • Cheshire West and Chester
  • Greater Manchester
  • West London (covering Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham)
  • Essex.

The pilots will create a joint team with local partners, aided by Government officials and the Local Government Association, to establish their devolved budget proposals with decision making structures for a locally run operation during 2012. This will help government to make significant public sector savings, cut red tape and improve policy making.

A Challenge and Learning Network will be set up to share learning from the pilots with other areas. The Network will help drive the Community Budget agenda forward helping make ensure they are ambitious, sustainable and capable of being replicated elsewhere. Fourteen councils will sit on the network:

  • Birmingham
  • Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council
  • Cornwall Council
  • Durham
  • Hertfordshire
  • Lincolnshire
  • Greenwich
  • Harrow
  • Sheffield
  • Shropshire
  • Sunderland City Council
  • Swindon
  • Wiltshire
  • Worcestershire.

Fifteen areas had expressed an interest in undertaking a Whole-Place Community Budget pilot, from which six were short-listed (see 'On this site', top right).

Neighbourhood-Level Community Budgets

The Secretary of State also announced on 21 December 2011 that the 10 'neighbourhood-level' Community Budget pilots are:

  • Cowgate, Kenton Bar and Montague in Newcastle
  • White City in London
  • Norbiton in London 
  • Poplar in London
  • Queens Park in London
  • Ilfracombe in North Devon
  • Bradford Trident
  • Sherwood in Tunbridge Wells
  • Haverhill in Suffolk and
  • Castle Vale, Shard End and Balsall Heath in Birmingham (see 'On this site', top right).

These areas have been selected to develop smaller scale Community Budgets next year that will give residents a micro-local level say over the services they want and use. The local community will play a leading role, working with the local council and other services, to shape the services they receive so they work from a customer's perspective; a powerful demonstration of bringing to life the Open Public Services White Paper's ambitions. A package of support will be agreed with each of the 10 pilots.

45 areas had expressed an interest in undertaking a neighbourhood-level Community Budget, from which 24 were short-listed (see 'On this site', top right).

Using the Community Budget approach for other themes

On 28 June 2011 the Deputy Prime Minister also announced that we will roll out Community Budgets more widely and explore how this approach might be extended to wider issues in local areas (see 'On this site', top right).

We want to support other local areas use the Community Budget approach beyond families with multiple problems, such as on ageing and environment, and build on the work that has already been started with the local government sector in relation to data sharing, innovative finance, financial accountability and barriers.

Further information can be found in the Q&A (see 'Related downloads').

How can I find out more?

For matters regarding Troubled Families please contact Families.Team@communities.gsi.gov.uk.

For matters on the Prospectus (both Whole-Place and Neighbourhood-Level) please contact CommunityBudgetsPilots@communities.gsi.gov.uk.

The Local Government Association have a Community Budgets website (see 'On other sites' top right), through which you can subscribe to regular bulletins highlighting developments and support. The products produced by the local government sector to assist in forming a Community Budget can be found through the website's 'Online Learning Resource'.

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