In their drive for ‘transparent government’, our new coalition leaders have today published a list of all the quango heads who earn more than the prime minister.
It’s an enlightening read and throws up some surprising facts. For instance, it turns out that seven directors at the Audit Commission earn more than £150K. An eighth, chairman Michael O’Higgins, is paid between £90K and £95K for a two-day week.
It's no wonder that questions are being asked about the future of the watchdog. Already the government has announced the abolition of Comprehensive Area Assessments, which the Audit Commission oversaw, and further cuts are likely.
CAA was a bureaucratic and expensive process concerned with assessing how effectively local services and partnerships were working. There may be a need for some degree of external assessment, but there is a trade off between external inspection and internal governance. Too much inspection and regulation inhibits the development of good internal governance. We need a lot less of the former and a lot more of the latter.
Over the past ten years or so, local and regional partnerships have become one of the main vehicles for delivering public services. However, there have always been concerns and debates about what value is actually being added by the partnerships themselves over and above that being delivered by individual service programmes under their remit. This is especially relevant when one considers that:
- There will be substantial (but probably unknown) costs associated with running the partnership
- The services that fall under the partnership remit are actually delivered, by and large, by a series of implementing agencies and not the partnership itself
- Many partnerships have focused their effort (as they were encouraged to do) on identifying progress in relation to internal matters such as structures and processes rather than the more difficult task of assessing the impact they have had on service outcomes
To demonstrate their value added and to improve internal governance, partnerships need to have a robust but workable approach to demonstrating their performance. This approach needs to consider both the value for money actually delivered by partnership-led services and the value added by the partnership itself. If more progress isn’t made on this issue then the future of partnerships themselves may be called into question.
Malcolm Prowle is Professor of Business Performance at Nottingham Business School and a visiting professor at the Open University Business School. He can be contacted via his web page www.malcolmprowle.com A copy of a paper on the issue of assessing partnership performance can be obtained, free of charge, by emailing a request to [email protected]
