19 December 2003
Twenty-six councils have won promotion and nine have slipped down the rankings as the Audit Commission published the first annual update of the Comprehensive Performance Assessments on December 18.
The updated rankings for England's 150 top-tier local authorities, published almost a year to the day after the inaugural results were released, show that 55% of councils are either 'excellent' or 'good'.
They also reveal an upward trend among councils languishing in the lower categories: 14 of the 34 deemed 'weak' or 'poor' last year have moved up.
There are now 26 authorities ranked 'excellent', up from 22 last year; 56 are 'good', up from 54; 40 are 'fair', as in 2002; 18 are 'weak', down from 21; and ten are 'poor', down from 13.
Star performers were East Sussex and Windsor & Maidenhead councils, both surging two categories from 'weak' to 'good'.
Kingston-upon-Thames was the only authority to lose its 'excellent' status, slipping into the 'good' category because of poor environmental services.
Three authorities slipped from 'good' to 'fair'; four from 'fair' to 'weak'; and Plymouth had the unwelcome honour of being the only council newly labelled 'poor'.
Audit Commission chair James Strachan said that overall the results were 'excellent' news.
'CPA is not just about ranking, it aims to provide councils with vital information and recommendations to help them improve,' he said. 'Through our commitment to strategic regulation, the commission will help this improvement by targeting our resources where they will be of most value.'
Sir Jeremy Beecham, chair of the Local Government Association, said the CPA was proving so successful that central government and its agencies should be subject to the same regime.
He also called on the government to speed up the introduction of the freedoms that have been promised to high-performing councils.
'The sooner improvement is rewarded with the faster delivery of freedoms and flexibilities, which will enable councils to adopt more innovative and radical improvements, the better it will be for the people who receive council services.'
Beecham also voiced concerns about the methodology used by the commission to compile the updated results, warning that a 'small number' of authorities were suffering because some of the performance data dated from March 2003. 'Any number-crunching inspection process is bound to have its shortcomings,' he said.
Roger Hughes, head of corporate policy at Coventry, which remained in the 'poor' category, told Public Finance that although the support it had received this year had been helpful, the council still had misgivings about the CPA.
'We don't think that the current methodology works in a good way,' he said. 'If you add up a lot of numbers that mean something, by the time you've done it they probably don't anymore.'
But local government minister Nick Raynsford said the results showed that the CPA, introduced in an overhaul of the Best Value regime, was achieving its objectives. 'We introduced CPA to drive improvement in local government and that is exactly what it is doing,' he said.
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