Photos: Pete Chapman/Skuds/Peter Lloyd/CC BY-SA 2.0

Getting public sector bodies to aggregate their travel spending, or indeed even to manage it at all, has been a patchy process. The more common practice is for travel management companies to bid for contracts that pertain to the spend of only one organisation.

But this approach could be about the change if Total Place takes root in a major cultural change in the public sector.

Given the savings that could be available from it in the present financial climate, Total Place is likely to march on whoever wins the coming general election because the combination of doing better but spending less will be irresistible to any government.

Total Place originated as a concept in the Treasury. The idea is that if one were able to look at the totality of public spending on an area, then at the totality of what the public sector seeks to do in that area, and then bring all that money to bear on those objectives there would be better results for less cost.

Total Place does not in itself affect the OGC Buying Solutions framework contract for business travel.

“An exercise by London Councils found that if a Total Place approach were applied to the £73.6bn of public money spent in London each year, savings of some £11bn could be realised.”

Were public spending aggregated across different bodies at local level these partnerships could still use the Buying Solutions framework if they chose to and would have large contracts to let. But they would be free to let travel management contracts themselves if they chose to do so.

The idea would see money that is at present split across silos – local authorities, the NHS, the police, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Homes and Communities Agency, Youth Justice Board and other assorted quangos – brought together as the public funding for an area.

Who would control it, possibly the local authority or a public sector partnership board, is not yet settled.

While travel obviously does not form a large share of this spending, the direction in which Total Place would take public bodies is fairly obvious – if they are joining up their own finances at local level it would make no sense not to join up their travel spending into one giant contract too.

An exercise by London Councils – which represents all 33 local authorities in the capital – reported in February that if a Total Place approach were applied to the £73.6bn of public money spent in London each year, savings of some £11bn could be realised.

Some of these came from conventional efficiency savings, but most resulted from the removal of duplication – for example between the NHS and adult social care.

A wider pilot run by the Treasury looked at spending in 13 areas. This gave an idea of scale of the rationalisation potentially on offer as within those areas were found 63 local authorities, 34 Primary Care Trusts, 12 fire authorities and 13 police authorities plus various quangos.

It found that 2% of public spending could be saved, the equivalent of £1.2bn a year across England.

There has been some dispute about whether the higher savings found by London Councils in a geographically compact area like the capital could be achieved more widely, but the Treasury was satisfied enough with the pilot results to press on with Total Place.

In a foreword to the report on the pilots, Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, and John Denham, communities and local government secretary wrote: “The 13 pilots have taken a fresh look at what money is coming into their area, explored what obstacles there are to making funding go further, examined the complexities within the system and how best to strip out the inefficiencies and wastage they discovered.”

The evidence base from the pilots, they said, provided a strong platform for us to take radical change at local level and on a national scale, “which can deliver true transformation in public services across the country”.

They added that the pilots’ results showed “that real savings can be made through the Total Place approach.

“It also makes clear the need for strong local leadership, with local authorities playing a pivotal role in delivering radical improvements in services, with their partners…that build on the pilots’ findings.”

Things are on hold until after the general election, but the direction is clear – public budgets at local level will increasingly be joined up, and that will eventually include travel.

Map of the 13 Total Place Pilot projects

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