Survival of the fittest, by Phil Swann

5 Jan 06
Are Comprehensive Performance Assessments local government's very own I'm a celebrity contest a desperate scrabble for stars and praise or a helpful catalyst for improvement? Phil Swann reports

06 January 2006

Are Comprehensive Performance Assessments local government's very own I'm a celebrity contest – a desperate scrabble for stars and praise – or a helpful catalyst for improvement? Phil Swann reports

The contrast could not have been greater. 'Half of all town halls are wasting council tax,' screamed the front page headline in The Times. 'Seventy per cent of councils continue to show real improvement against harder CPA test,' whispered the Audit Commission's announcement of its latest council rankings.

The media's enthusiasm for news angles that criticise councils and other public service providers is a serious weakness of the government's enthusiasm for league tables. These are meant to help inform the public – but it is hard to know who learnt what from some of the reporting of the 2005 Comprehensive Performance Assessment results.

Much of the debate about the validity or otherwise of CPA judgements has added precious little to our understanding of local government performance. One thing is evident, however – in a significant number of councils the shock of a poor ranking prompted a determined improvement programme, particularly when it coincided with a change in political control or the arrival of a new chief executive or leader.

The commission last month endorsed local government's claim to have turned the rhetoric of self-improvement into reality. Between them, the Local Government Association, the Improvement and Development Agency and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister have put in place a package of support with a proven capacity to help councils to improve their performance.

The fact that 44 upper-tier councils have two or fewer stars shows that there are still councils that need that support. One of the challenges facing the LGA and the rest of the national local government family is to ensure that there is an effective brokering service to match those councils with bespoke packages of assistance for their particular needs and weaknesses.

On occasion, the contestants on ITV's I'm a celebrity, get me out of here! stretched themselves to their limits. But we must not fall into the trap of treating council improvement as a municipal bushtucker trial. There is a serious mismatch between what councils need to do to collect their CPA stars and the things that politicians want to do to meet the needs and aspirations of their electorates.

Too often, improvement is not seen as being about improving the life chances of individuals and communities or about building a stronger democracy. Instead, Improvement (note the capital I) is seen as being about managerial compliance with an externally imposed assessment process.

A new policy paper published by the LGA argues that the current improvement framework is designed to help councils become 'competent' organisations. In other words, organisations that have got the 'basics' right, that have sorted out their 'organisational hygiene'.

The paper, Beyond competence: driving local government improvement, argues that there is a surprisingly deep and wide consensus about the attributes of a competent council, the barriers some councils face in becoming competent and the support they need to overcome those barriers.

But the challenges facing society in the early years of the twenty-first century mean that local government should be more ambitious than that. The paper, based on a study carried out by the Tavistock Institute and the Local Government Centre at Warwick Business School, argues that the challenge now is to help councils move 'beyond competence' and to reconnect the improvement agenda with local politics and with what really motivates local councillors and council officers.

The paper sets out three reasons why this move is necessary.

First, meeting a set of political aspirations on behalf of a local community requires a range of skills way beyond those needed to achieve competence.

Second, securing the inter-organisational and cross-sectoral working necessary to address the public policy challenges of today requires political and managerial leadership of the highest order.

And, third, only a council that has moved beyond competence is likely to be able to thrive in a context that – because of the dynamics of social change and politics, national and local – is inherently unstable.

The LGA paper goes on to argue that we do not know enough about the characteristics of councils that have the potential to move beyond competence. It floats a number of possibilities, including:

  • A developed and well-embedded culture of change: a council that rewards experiments, basks in difference and accepts and learns from failure
  • An orientation towards policy innovation, akin to the original development in local government of the concept of local management of schools
  • Ongoing organisational innovation, especially in forms of partnership working
  • Innovation in people management, making the move from transactional human resources to strategic or transformational human resources.

New models of support and assistance will be needed to help councils to move beyond competence. They could include, for example, the development of a learning culture with genuine pilots in which councils and their partners could push at the boundaries of innovation and experimentation. Or a new approach to external challenge to help councils to 'destabilise or reframe the present' and rethink what they are doing and how.

A further challenge highlighted in the paper is helping councils to retain their competence. A change in political leadership can act as a powerful stimulus to improvement, but in other circumstances political turbulence can put a council's performance at risk. A lack of organisational ambition and inadequate engagement with local people, partners or staff can also cause a slide out of competence. Securing three – or even four – CPA stars might in reality only be a calm before a storm.

The real concern here is that councils at risk of losing competence might not feature on the radar screens of organisations charged with supporting local government improvement until the slide has begun. One issue that needs to be explored, for example, is whether the current, essentially retrospective, inspection process can help to identify councils that are at risk of losing competence, as opposed to those that have already begun to do so.

The conclusions reached by the Tavistock and Warwick researchers have in many ways been reinforced by the most recent CPA results. The commission's notion of councils improving 'strongly' – as opposed to those improving 'well' or 'adequately' – mirrors the notion of moving beyond competence. The question is what part the CPA has to play in helping to deliver that move.

The research on which the LGA report is based took place in local government, but its conclusions are applicable more widely. It is significant, for example, that the former chief inspector of schools, David Bell, warned in his recent annual report, that many schools, 'while not in a state of crisis, are providing nothing better than mediocrity'.

The move beyond competence requires an ambitious change in performance. And if councils are to be supported in making that shift, there needs to be an equally radical change in what the inspectorates and local government's national bodies do.

  • Phil Swann is director of the Tavistock Institute. Beyond competence is available from the LGA on 020 7664 3131

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