Place Based Budgets

This guidance sets out the aims, design and delivery framework for the Place Based Budgets programme. The programme tests whether local partners, working through Mayoral Strategic Authorities, can pool budgets, align governance and redesign services around specific cohorts to deliver better outcomes for the people who rely on them.

It is a response to a problem that has persisted for too long. Public services have been organised around the departments that fund them rather than the people who use them. Funding flows through separate systems with different rules, and the result is duplication, late intervention, and people falling through the gaps.

This is not a new diagnosis. Fifteen years ago, Total Place began to test a different approach across 13 pilot areas covering 63 local authorities, mapping around £82 billion in local public spending and showing that redesigning services around the user, rather than institutional boundaries, can produce better preventative outcomes for less public money. That work was cut short in 2010, before the proposition could be tested in practice.

This government is now building on those foundations with greater ambition. Mayoral Strategic Authorities, which did not exist in 2009, provide the convening power and strategic reach that place-based reform requires. Place Based Budgets are the test of whether that ambition can be made to work in practice.

The 5 pilots are led by:

• Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, focusing on special educational needs and disabilities
• North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, focusing on young people at risk of offending in Gateshead and South Tyneside
• South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, focusing on adults facing multiple disadvantage in Doncaster
• West Midlands Mayoral Combined Authority, focusing on adolescent mental health across Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton and Walsall
• West Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, focusing on preventing youth unemployment

The programme also partners with Greater Manchester’s Prevention Demonstrator.

Place Based Budgets are a key element of the government’s wider public service reform agenda, focused on integration, prevention and devolution. This guidance outlines how 5 pilot areas will test whether more coordinated funding and decision-making can drive service improvement, stronger collaboration and cultural change. It covers programme aims, principles, co-design expectations, governance, resource mapping and budget pooling, alongside central government support and funding arrangements. It also sets out a phased implementation timeline to 2029 and an evaluation framework to generate evidence on feasibility, effectiveness and scalability, with an emphasis on shared learning across pilots and the wider system.

This is the first version of the guidance, tested across places and partners. As we learn more, we will update our assumptions, models, findings and improve on this guidance so that we can capture and share learnings along the way.