06 December 2008
Out go heavy-handed, target-driven Comprehensive Performance Assessments. In comes the light-touch, joined-up Comprehensive Area Assessment regime, headed up by your own personal 'lead'. At least that's the theory. Alex Klaushofer maps the progress so far
If the rhetoric is to be believed, the public sector is about to enter a new dawn in performance management. The Comprehensive Area Assessment, which replaces the Comprehensive Performance Assessment in April 2009, promises to be everything its predecessor wasn't: light-touch, joined-up, locally focused and accessible to the public.
Talk to Steve Bundred, chief executive of the Audit Commission and the man charged with overseeing the new regime, and it sounds as if the CAA could be the answer to every harried public sector professional's prayers. There will be no 'inspection event' to prepare for, with assessors gathering material from publicly available sources and organisations' own performance management data. Instead, a 'single assessment framework' will assess the services provided by councils and their partners, yielding reports – published via a new web reporting tool – that are expected to 'resonate with the public'.
'We want to ensure that the public is more engaged with the CAA than it has been with the CPA,' he told Public Finance. 'The CPA has been a powerful driver of improvement in local government, but I can't honestly say they talk of little else in my local pub. We want the CAA to be used more like Trip Adviser, and some of the websites that people do use.'
Other, less glamorous reasons for the reform, he admits, include the fact that the CPA was delivering diminishing returns in terms of improvements. It was also costly: the Audit Commission hopes that the new framework will help meet a government target to cut the cost of inspection and regulation by 30% by 2009.
The CAA approach will certainly be different. A range of inspectorates' accounts will feed into an assessment of councils, health bodies, police and fire services conducted by a new figure called a CAA lead. Taking Local Area Agreements and Sustainable Community Strategies as their starting point, assessments will aim to establish how far each area is meeting its own locally set priorities. An organisational assessment will focus on councils and public bodies, while an area assessment is to examine outcomes. Good and bad performance will be signalled by a system of green and red flags.
The CAA lead will be central. Each authority will have its own lead for three years, who will survey progress in the area and maintain a dialogue with public service managers before producing a report. Following a restructuring, some external recruitment and an intensive programme of training, the Audit Commission now has 41 CAA leads gearing up for their new roles.
CAA lead Adewale Kadiri came to the Audit Commission in August this year from the Healthcare Commission and will be assessing six boroughs in northeast London.
He insists that the role is different from that of inspectors under the CPA regime, characterising it as a 'critical friend'. He says: 'It's being prepared to give difficult messages as required, but making sure that we do it in a way that doesn't pull people down or make the authority feel we don't understand the pressures they're under.'
Understanding local context is also vital, he adds. 'It's about engaging much more fully with all key players, and not just councils.'
Bundred says that communication between assessor and assessed will be such that councils can count on a 'no surprise' approach. 'If you're the chief executive of Ealing, say, you would know who the CAA lead was because a feature of this process is that there should be nothing in the reporting which comes as a surprise,' he says.
But while the aspirations embodied in the CAA have been welcomed almost universally, the ten authorities that took part in pilots this summer have concerns about whether the new regime will live up to its promise.
Una McCarthy, performance manager at Westminster City Council, which has just undergone a trial area assessment, questions whether the CAA will lift the burden on councils. 'There are still concerns about the breadth of the new organisational assessment, which has the potential to feel like an annual corporate assessment,' she says. 'There's a risk the organisation may have bigger overheads than previously.'
The fear, local government representatives say, is that far from feeling freed from the rigours of a single 'inspection event', councils will behave as if life is one long inspection. 'We have concerns that the reality on the ground could see an increase in preparing for and complying with the new inspection regime,' says Steve Johnson, corporate director of London Councils.
Annette Madden, programme director for improvement at the Local Government Association, agrees. 'We support the CAA and its intentions, but we're not convinced at this point in time that it's going to reduce the burden,' she says.
Another emerging concern is the system of awarding green and red flags to signal good or failing performance. Despite Westminster getting a good report without red flags in its dry run, McCarthy questions the wisdom of this approach. 'I think using the same language for green and red flags is wrong,' she says. 'It's the same currency for two things that are completely different and I can see them becoming a league table.'
Johnson also points to the potential pitfalls. 'A real concern is that the public will look at the number of red and green flags that an authority's got and make a simple mathematical calculation,' he says. 'For councils, public perception is an integral part of performance.'
Bundred's response to such concerns is part re-assurance, part robust defence. Red flags will be given only where authorities are dragging their heels in addressing poor performance, he says, or are 'in denial' about service failure.
'There will be no occasions where a CAA report includes a red flag where our concern about that issue hasn't been raised at a much earlier stage,' he says. He rejects the description of a 'scoring system'.
'We also feel that people in local government need to recognise that they're not the only audience for the CAA,' he says. 'The CAA has to resonate with the public, and it also has to meet the needs of ministers.
'If it doesn't meet the needs of ministers, what will happen is that government departments will invent some alternative framework to tell them the sort of things that they need to know about what's happening in local areas,' he adds. 'We think that the system of flags is a good way of doing that without having a scoring system.'
By contrast, the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham's trial did not prompt fears about the prospective burden of the new regime.The council was disappointed when its CAA lead, who had been in post about two months, spent less time with officials than they hoped and produced a report they felt did not reflect what was going on in the area.
'We were very disappointed about the first draft of the report,' says Guy Swindle, the council's head of policy, partnerships, performance and communications. 'It felt quite superficial and quite weighted towards quantitative data rather than qualitative data. It was out of date and still written in an inspectorate language, which I would paraphrase as “glass half empty” rather than “glass half full”.
'There's a big difference between an inspection and an assessment. It's something about the language, the way you question, the way you look at things.'
The council is still waiting for the trial organisational assessment it was promised, which Swindle puts down to a shortage of CAA leads to run the trials.
His conclusion is that a fairer picture would emerge if the CAA lead were to spend more time with the authority – between a day a month and a day a quarter, he estimates. 'I want the lead more involved. I don't see that as a burden,' he says. 'I want them sitting round the table so they're part of the decision.'
CAA lead Kadiri estimates that he will spend about 20 days a year with each area/borough, but adds that this could be increased or decreased as it becomes clearer how much time is needed under the new system. 'The first year's going to be “suck it and see”, to a certain extent,' he says.
Stockport Council has a different take on its experience of both an organisational and an area assessment in the trials.
'We have to say that the Audit Commission organised the trials very well. They were true to their word in trying to lift the burden from local authorities, in that much of the work was desk work and happened behind the scenes,' says Jane Scullion, the council's assistant chief executive. She considers the resulting report 'a reasonably accurate description' of local services, and was pleased to have had a CAA lead who already knew the area.
But she has reservations about how far the new system will help public service providers improve performance. 'The jury's still out on whether it's going to drive improvement in the same way as the CPA,' she says, adding that Stockport's trial report lacked clear recommendations about where organisations might go next.
'It's not written in a language that the public would find accessible. It was written in the same manner as the old corporate assessment. One of the aims was to report to the public in a way that's accessible and interesting. I don't feel it's achieved that in the initial assessment.'
Swindle agrees that there is a gap between the Audit Commission's intentions and practice. 'They genuinely want to make this work. They haven't done it yet in practice. Our experience, so far, is that they haven't got it right yet.' One observation shared by the trial authorities is that the CAA lead is crucial to success. 'I think it's really important to have a good relationship with your CAA lead so they understand the area,' says McCarthy.
It's clear that the CAA lead needs to be a special public service professional. Bundred characterises the skills set for the role as 'the ability to analyse large amounts of data and to come to a sort of mature judgement about what it's telling you about the likelihood of what are often very ambitious objectives at a local level being achieved.
'People need to understand about service delivery but they need to understand the issues that impact on outcomes that are not just service delivery – the inter-relationship with political and managerial processes, the way in which partnerships function,' he adds.
Much will also be asked of the various inspection bodies coming together to give a common picture of the area for the first time. The CAA will combine seven inspectorates, including Ofsted and the police and prison inspectorates, although the number will go down to six when the new merged health and social care regulator, the Care Quality Commission, starts work in April 2009.
'It is challenging,' admits Bundred. 'But the pilots we've been doing are confirming to us that it's nevertheless do-able.'
Yet on the ground there are already tales of some inspectorates circumventing the CAA lead and contacting local authorities directly, while concerns about the difficulty of overcoming the public sector's enduring 'silo' culture are widespread.
The shift to assessing an area in terms of broad outcomes has both advantages and disadvantages, according to Professor Simon Burgess, director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University.
'It's less manipulable in that I may well be able to control or strongly influence the number of operations or GCSEs that are produced, whereas it's much harder for me to manipulate the level of health in my area,' he says. 'That's good – it's actually what we want our council to do. We don't care about the number of operations per se; what we actually want our local authority to do is improve health.'
On the other hand, the approach carries risks for the organisations involved, particularly councils with their pivotal role, he adds. 'The risk of organisations being judged on things that are outside their influence is much greater. Oftentimes we are going to wrongly praise or criticise a council.'
Westminster's McCarthy also sees this as a potential pitfall. 'I felt it was too council-centric and that we're still bearing the brunt of it,' she says. 'That was due in part to condensing an annual process into three months,' she says. 'Engaging all public sector partners will be key to making area assessment a reality.'
Like others who have been involved in the development of the CAA, she already has ideas about how it might be done differently.
'There is another way. Instead of the light touch they are proposing, it has to be the right touch,' she says. 'Rather than spending audit and inspection resources across all outcome areas and looking at them in the same level of detail year after year, I'd prefer to have more of a peer review type process focusing on the key improvement areas locally.'
But with the second consultation now finished, there is little opportunity for changes to the CAA final framework and guidance for CAA leads that the Audit Commission is aiming to publish in February.
And Stockport's Scullion points out that, since much of the CAA's evidence will be derived from data that is already being gathered, such as national indicators and place surveys, the regime has effectively begun.
'We are in CAA already,' she says. 'It's not something in the future – it's here now.'
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