Total Place

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Our 'Total Place' experience

Warrington has been part of an important pilot project called 'Total Place'.  Working with the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, Warrington volunteered to be part of a pilot that took an in-depth and unique look at services for children aged 0 - 5 years and their families.

With the ultimate aim of delivering better and more efficient services, or greater public value, detailed work was undertaken to look at our customer needs, how we spend our money and how we work in partnership.  Some broad messages have come out of the pilot:

• Investing in prevention means that savings can be made further down the line.
• Putting the customer at the heart of service redesign will help lead to more effective services.
• Encouraging self-reliance - enabling communities to support themselves.  Sometimes the best service is no service!
• Pooling budgets and looking at all the money that is coming into the locality as one pot and focusing in delivering outcomes rather than services.
• Reducing bureacracy in the way we interact with each other and using 'lean thinking' in how we structure ourselves across Warrington and the region.

The messages from this, and other Total Place pilots, will be used to change how we deliver public sector services in a more holistic way - providing better services for our citizens and in a more efficient way.  A Total Place report aimed at providing guidance to practitioners on doing things differently has been produced by the Leadership Centre for Local Government.  This guide summarises the lessons learned from across the Total Place pilots and challenges practitioners from across the public sector to think and behave in different ways.

The lessons from our own pilot and others from across the country will help us in Warrington think about how we can improve other services by setting up an environment for innovation, exploring our collective leadership styles and identifying the barriers we need to overcome to achieve effective partnership working.  We're using the work we're doing around Closing the Gap to help us identify key areas and groups of people that could benefit from a Total Place approach.

You can download a copy of the Manchester City Region and Warrington Total Place Report here.

For more information about Total Place and all the pilots that have taken place across the country go to http://www.localleadership.gov.uk/totalplace/