Introduction ‘Partnership: suppressing hatred in search of money’ – the opening gambit of the comedian, journalist and social entrepreneur, Simon Fanshawe, in his speech at the 2003 conference dinner of the Local Government Information Unit. At the time he was chair of the Brighton and Hove Strategic Partnership, and to this day he chairs their Economic Partnership. Working in partnerships is an almost inevitable response to an economic downturn and consequent cuts in public expenditure. But are partnerships a panacea for achieving ‘more for less’ from the public purse, or do they herald a false dawn where organisational synergies are confounded by legitimately differing priorities or hostile self-serving manoeuvrings? Many of the potential benefits of partnership working are self-evident – there are economies if premises are shared, if work between agencies is better coordinated, and if the users of services are involved in how they are planned and administered. But these potential benefits are often more easily identified than realised. There is resistance to giving up or sharing resources, whether of budgets, staff or premises. Better co-ordination may reduce the workloads of some agencies, but it will increase the workloads of others – and they may resist this. Users of services often have aspirations which cannot easily be met in practice. Thus, it is by no means certain that partnership working will prove to be a purposeful response to the recession. Depending on the outcomes partnerships are designed to address (the task) and how the partners choose to work with each other (the process), partnership working may achieve ‘more for less’ or ‘less for more’. This chapter analyses the theory and practice of UK public sector partnerships with the aim of exploring what local authorities and their partners can do to maximise the possibility of achieving positive benefits from partnership working in a recession. It starts by summarising key conclusions from the academic literature on partnerships, which spell out and dig deeper into the ambiguity that whilst there are potential benefits from working in partnership, they are not automatic, and partnerships can fail. The chapter considers in detail the initial experiences of a recent development in partnership working, ‘Place Based

Budgeting’ (or, in its earlier incarnation, ‘Total Place’), created under the auspices of Local Strategic Partnerships and involving all the statutory and voluntary public sector players in a local area. This chapter is therefore an exploration of the issues which must be confronted before whole area partnerships can go beyond ‘hot air and empty window dressing’, to enable real changes which result in productivity gains and better public service outcomes.