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Learning and testing

The UK Experience by Malcolm Morley*

Refreshed from holidays, Council Chief Executives in England have returned to find that the Audit Commission has produced a report on Learning from Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) in 2005/06 and a discussion paper on the future assessment of Councils. The key messages from the Learning from CPA Report are that Councils have made good progress on a number of fronts but can do better on:

• working with partners and the public to develop ambitious visions for sustainable communities
• ensuring that linkages to achieve economic, housing and environmental improvements are made and that they deliver improvements in practice
• developing, measuring and managing outcomes more effectively particularly in relation to community cohesion
• developing strategies for healthier living, older people, minority and isolated groups and vulnerable children
• developing performance management and user engagement
• improving the governance arrangements of partnerships.

The paper on the future assessment of Councils looks to the successor to CPA post 2008 and confirms the move to assessing Councils in the context of the communities they serve and the network of partnerships required to support the ongoing evolution of sustainable communities. It poses eight key questions. The two most important ones being:

• how can a future approach reinforce the core responsibility of Councils and their partners to manage their own performance?
• how can a greater focus on citizen and service user needs be achieved given increasing community diversity?

The key messages from the Learning from CPA Report, coupled with the questions above, confirm the difficult challenges being faced by Councils.

Outcomes for communities and citizens are no longer the sole responsibility of Councils or indeed dominated by service provision by Councils. The pluralism of local governance and service provision means that outcomes are dependent upon a heady mix of public, private and voluntary sector inputs and lifestyle choices. Partnership working is required to deliver outcomes.

Accountability for performance, never mind performance management, is increasingly complex in the context of partnership working. Central Government remains remote from local accountability for performance. Local accountability for performance is required if the challenges above are to be addressed. Will Government and others be willing to be locally accountable? If they are, what mechanism will be used to achieve that accountability?

Should Councils, as Local Government, hold service providers to account for local performance? If Councils are service providers, can they hold themselves to account?

The old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink is true for community engagement. Some individuals and groups do not want to engage with Councils and are not interested in contributing to the evolution of their communities and their Councils. Reality dictates that Councils do not have the ability to respond to all community interests. Local Government is about making positive choices about which community interests are to be focused upon by Councils and their partners.

Hopefully Councils and their partners will be judged realistically on how they have sought to identify the community's/service user's interests, whether they have applied a credible prioritisation/evaluation process to them, whether they have prioritised resource investment and whether they have ensured that the outcomes required have been delivered.

*Malcolm Morley is Chief Executive of Harlow District Council and can be contacted via the Editor, email info@lgfocus.com.au The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of his employer.

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