The director of strategic partnerships at Birmingham city council, Jackie Mould, has asked for more "control and flexibility" over budgets ahead of Chancellor George Osborne's spending review.

Mould voiced her concerns as she appeared before the communities and local government select committee to give evidence on the community budget pilots.

When asked by Labour Corby MP Andy Sawford for recommendations to take to the chancellor to improve community budgets, Mould said she wanted deals at a city level to allow more local power over spending. "Ultimately, we want to see more flexibility over budgets coming into our area, with local controls over how we use them," she said.

This, she added, would enable councils to work towards shared outcomes across agencies and "deliver different models on the ground", rather than working around the varying budget restrictions set by central government departments. .

Geoff Little, deputy chief executive at Manchester city council, said community budget pilots had been a "big step forward" in overcoming barriers and showing how spending could be reduced. Asked why the community budgets had failed to "set the local government world on fire", however, he said they were working to ignite those fires and that key people locally and nationally had become converts to community budgets.

Adding that it will be a challenge to "make sure money moves round the system", Little said the "driver" behind these reforms was budget restrictions, since adopting different service delivery models would reduce demand.

All in the panel agreed that the next big challenge was to find a way to scale up community budgets. They also all stressed the need for more commercially-minded expertise to be brought in.

During the session, Liberal Democrat MP for Southport John Pugh asked how community budgets were assisting in achieving integrated care, which was described as the "holy grail" of joined-up budgets.

Robinson said the move towards integrated health and social care – which could save the government millions of pounds – cannot succeed without the support of local leaders. Little added that success would not be about pooling budgets but providing financial incentives so that all the organisations involved made savings from this approach.

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