03 December 2004
A single co-ordinating body must be set up to reduce drastically the bureaucratic burden councils are forced to bear because of the regulation and inspection regime, town hall leaders are demanding.
The Local Government Association wants a concerted effort to end multiple demands for the same information by the 13 different inspectorates, a problem it says is endemic to the system.
It is calling for the local services inspectorate forum, which brings together all the watchdogs and is intended to avoid duplication of effort, to be given more teeth.
The forum, currently chaired by Ofsted chief David Bell, is voluntary but the LGA says this approach has failed and it needs to be beefed up.
It made its call on December 1, as the Audit Commission prepares to publish its proposals next week for overhauling the Comprehensive Performance Assessment methodology beyond 2005.
Simon Milton, chair of the LGA's improvement board, said urgent action was needed to stem the mushrooming costs of an overly burdensome regime.
He said nine out of ten authorities claimed they went through too many inspections and two-thirds believed the costs outweighed the benefits.
'A co-ordinating body to pull this together must be given the weight and status it needs to bring about the radical change that is required,' Milton added.
The LGA's demand came as the Audit Commission launched phase two of its area profiles pilot scheme. The profiles are intended to draw together the information produced by inspection bodies on local services.
Bob Walding, the commission's director of knowledge and learning, said all information fed into profiles would be put on a website by April 2006. This would be available to the other inspectorates and would help to cut the audit burden on service providers.
'Part of the aim is that it is a bureaucracy-busting measure. We are certainly not inventing new data items for this,' Walding added.
At the same time, there have been calls for greater clarity about the type of help offered to councils identified by inspectors as failing.
Nick Sharman, a trustee of the New Local Government Network, told the LGA's conference on improvement that there needed to be firm decisions about how to use the £27m capacity-building fund.
'We need a clear message about the type of help that is needed and how that can best be delivered,' he said.
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