21 November 2003
Councils in Scotland will each undergo a new in-depth audit to determine whether they are meeting their Best Value duties, Audit Scotland has announced.
The audit will focus on overall performance in each of the 32 unitary councils and the results will be made public. However, Audit Scotland has given an assurance that these will not include league tables, scores or overall labels to rank councils.
Giving details of the new arrangements on November 21, the spending watchdog also announced the names of the first councils to be examined during 2004. The seven councils selected for the first tranche are Angus, Dundee City, Inverclyde, North Ayrshire, Shetland, Stirling and West Lothian.
Audit Scotland chair Alastair MacNish said that, as well as looking at individual services and a council's financial accounts, the audit would examine the performance of the council as a whole and the way it was working with its partners in planning and delivering services.
It would provide the public with an overall picture of how well each council was performing, what it needed to do to improve and whether it was getting better over time.
The audit will take account of the differences in each council's circumstances, priorities and constraints and the need for local solutions to problems.
The arrangements will be very much in line with Scotland's less prescriptive approach to Best Value compared with England and Wales, and will aim to give a balanced assessment of a council's overall strengths and weaknesses rather than producing a range of judgments and indicators about performance.
MacNish said the audit would draw on council information systems, government inspectorate reports and other scrutiny work to ensure the reports were as comprehensive as possible and were carried out with a minimum of bureaucracy,
All 32 councils will be covered over a three-year cycle and the audit will take about 20 weeks from start to finish. Between each full audit, the council's external auditor will monitor progress. If the council has not made sufficient progress, the Accounts Commission will be alerted and may ask for further action to be taken.
Each audit, which will focus on the council as a whole, will result in a report to the commission. The first is expected to be ready for the commission to consider in the summer of 2004. One of the most important parts of the report will be an agreed improvement plan for action.
PFnov2003
