By Vivienne Russell
25 June 2010
Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has today written to councils informing them that Comprehensive Area Assessments will be stopped.
This takes forward a coalition government pledge to end the local services inspection regime developed by the Audit Commission and other public sector watchdogs.
Ministers maintain that scrapping the CAA will save the commission £10m as well as reducing inspection costs for councils.
Pickles said: ‘In the face of the nation’s £156bn deficit, central government needs to stop the costly top-down monitoring that is engulfing councils and start trusting them to do what is right locally.
‘Today I have instructed town hall watchdogs to stop tying the hands of council workers with unnecessary red tape and paperwork.
‘It is much more important for the public to know what their councils are doing than having thousands of hush-hush unseen papers sent back and forth between Whitehall bureaucrats and the town hall.’
David Parsons, leader of Leicestershire County Council and chair of the Local Government Association’s improvement board, said costs of data returns and inspection in Leicester and Leicestershire had been measured at £7m.
‘Presumably this is at least matched by the amount national agencies spend dealing with these returns and undertaking these inspections.
‘The reduction of the data and inspection burden and refocusing on localities is very welcome.’
Audit Commission chief executive Eugene Sullivan said the watchdog wrote to local service providers at the end of May notifying them that all CAA work would stop at once. He said the commission’s duty was to support providers ‘to deliver the highest quality services at minimum costs’. But he added: ‘Local bodies are, and must be, primarily responsible for improving their own performance.’
Decentralisation minister Greg Clarke is to lead work on further reducing more red tape for councils. He said ‘stifling bureaucracy’ had sapped responsibility and initiative from councils.
‘Transparency can make councils look to the public they serve, not to Whitehall. We need to have safeguards against things going wrong, but it is vital for democracy that we reverse the years of increasing state control and give power and responsibility back to people, communities and councils.’
Last month, PublicFinance reported that talks were already under way between councils and the Audit Commission to set up a peer review system to replace the CAA.
