30 November 2007
There are big ambitions for the Comprehensive Area Assessment: for it to judge how well councils are serving their communities, and for it to be a more nimble form of inspection than its predecessor. Steve Bundred spells out the vision
There is no collective noun for heads of public service inspectorates but we might need one soon. Collective working and close collaboration are at the core of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment, on which seven public service inspectorates are consulting.
The CAA forms part of the wider performance framework for local services that was trailed in last year's local government white paper, embodied in this year's Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act, and reflected in last month's Comprehensive Spending Review.
Many of the details will be resolved only after an analysis of responses to the consultation, which was launched last week and ends on February 15. But there is enough in the consultation document to make it clear that the similarity in name between CAA and the Audit Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment of local authorities – which it will replace – is deceptive.
To begin with, the CAA will be more ambitious than the CPA. It will not simply assess how well local authorities are performing. It will look more widely at what it is like to live in the communities they serve. But it will at the same time reduce the burden of assessment on those who manage public services.
This is a difficult trick to pull off. It can be done because the core annual assessment of future prospects, or the risk assessment that lies at the heart of the CAA, will be a joint assessment by inspectorates acting collectively. This will inform the risk-based programmes of inspection that each of them will undertake in the future.
For the most part, rolling programmes of inspection will go so there will be an end, for example, to Ofsted's joint area reviews of children's services, annual star ratings of social services by the Commission for Social Care Inspection and the Audit Commission's CPA, including the corporate assessments that feed into it.
The CAA will contribute to the public service inspectorates' drive to reduce the total cost of regulation, as required by the government. All the inspectorates (with the exception of those for criminal justice) have targets to reduce the costs of their regulation activity by 30% between 2003/04 and 2008/09.
The risk assessment is not the only element of the CAA that will be new. The reporting against the national performance indicator set, announced alongside the spending review, and on which government is currently consulting separately, will also be part of it. So will 'direction of travel' judgements about local authorities, but, whereas these have previously been made by the Audit Commission, they will in future be made by inspectorates collectively.
There will also continue to be 'use of resources' judgements for councils, primary care trusts, police authorities and fire and rescue authorities but these will take a new form. The Audit Commission is proposing that the themes within this assessment be reduced from five to three but that the scope of the assessment be widened to place a stronger emphasis on efficiency and to include such matters as sustainability.
It is undoubtedly the risk assessment that will attract most comment during the consultation period, not least because the judgements it will contain will be of most interest to the public.
We all know that the places we live in could be better, but that priorities for improvement are not the same everywhere. In some areas the key concerns of local people might be crime; in others it might be unemployment. We expect our local council to take a lead in defining priorities and working in partnership to address our concerns because the issues that matter most are unlikely to be solvable by the council alone.
The risk assessment will ask how well the local authority, through its partnerships, has understood community needs, what plans the partnership has to address them and how likely it is that these will succeed.
There will not be an annual or periodic inspection. Instead, the risk assessment will be reached by on-going engagement with the local authority and its partners, which draws on performance information and other documents used by the partnership to monitor achievement of its objectives. It will also use other relevant information, including the views of officials in the Government Offices for the Regions and, most importantly, the views of local people, expressed through satisfaction surveys, for example.
But inspectorates will avoid demanding information that is not used for other purposes. Also, they will share among themselves the information that councils and other local public services provide so the burden they collectively impose is further reduced.
A major question on which the consultation seeks views is how should CAA be reported? This applies both to the national indicator set and the risk assessment. The intention is that it should be easy for members of the public to get a quick and clear understanding of the performance, both collectively and individually, of the public bodies in their area.
So an easy-to-access style of web-based presentation will make it possible for people to drill down into any aspect of public services within an area. In this way, the CAA will be more relevant to the public than the assessments it will replace. It will contribute both to the ability of councils to engage with their communities and the ability of service users and taxpayers to hold public bodies to account.
There is also a specific issue about reporting the risk assessment. A simple overall score has been a characteristic of the CPA from the outset and has proved powerful. Whether it was the labels ranging from 'poor' to 'excellent' which were a feature of CPA in 2002, or the star ratings that replaced them in 2005, scoring has made it easy for members of the public to see how their council compares with others. So it has been one reason why the CPA has proved a strong catalyst for improvement.
With the CAA, however, the Audit Commission and its partners will be looking at different things in different places. The starting point for the risk assessment will be the priorities defined by the Local Strategic Partnership and reflected, in part, in the Local Area Agreement. A form of narrative reporting seems more appropriate.
This is especially so where a 'scored overall' judgement could prove to be little more than a meaningless average. In two-tier areas, the risk assessment will report at the county-wide level, but it will need to be capable of capturing any significant differences among the districts.
If there is no overall score for the risk assessment, there is a danger that the CAA could prove to be less effective than its predecessor in motivating people to bring about change. There is a danger, too, that in those circumstances the direction of travel and use of resources judgements, for which there will be a simple score that makes comparability easy, will attract more attention than the risk assessment.
A possible solution to this dilemma is a form of traffic lighting in which exceptional merits or concerns are highlighted within what is otherwise a narrative form of reporting. There would be no overall score but it would be easy to see whether, for example, county A had more green lights and fewer red ones than county B. We are keen to receive other proposals.
Reaching agreement among seven different inspectorates on the proposals described in the consultation document has not been easy. But we know that the CAA will not work unless it is seen to be asking the right questions on behalf of members of the public, and is regarded by councils and their partners as a credible form of assessment. So we are consulting, collectively, with an open mind.
We will develop more detailed proposals following some action learning with a few local authorities and their partners in a range of areas. Right now, it is important to us that we hear your views on what we have come up with so far.
Steve Bundred is chief executive of the Audit Commission
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