15 February 2008
An uncomfortable truth lurked amid all the congratulations that greeted last week's publication of the Audit Commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessments, lauded as the best ever by ministers, regulators and local government itself.
Despite the apparent across-the-board surge in performance by local authorities in recent years, members of the public remain stubbornly unimpressed with town hall services.
CPA 2007 tells us that four out of five councils are now 'good' or 'excellent', and sport three or four stars to prove it, while none now languishes in shame in the bottom category.
But public satisfaction ratings have failed to rise in response to the supposed improvements in services. Instead, they have tumbled ten percentage points to 51% in the past six years. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the CPA's governing philosophy of continuous improvement.
Some in the sector blithely wave away this inconsistency as the natural consequence of residents' rising expectations of local services – the public is never happy, in essence. But the reality, as ever, is more complex.
The Local Government Association is acutely aware of what it describes as a 'perplexing paradox' – indeed it has been running its 'reputation campaign' for the past two years to address it.
The LGA has conducted research, based on the Best Value Performance Indicators, and concluded that there is little correlation between how good an authority's services are and how highly the residents regard the institution. Even council tax levels have little impact, according to the research.
Instead, the problem apparently lies in the widespread public ignorance of what local government does. The councils with the highest satisfaction ratings are those that best keep residents informed.
Edward Welsh, the LGA's programme director for media and campaigns, explained to Public Finance: 'The most important influence shaping people's perceptions of their council is whether or not they consider the council is providing value for money.
'What drives perceptions of value for money is how well councils communicate with residents. This also produces perceptions of an efficient and well-run council and one that creates a better place for residents to live in.'
But this is only part of the story. The regulators themselves are aware that the CPA results are not the last word on local services.
Paul Snell, chief inspector at the Commission for Social Care Inspection, alluded to another likely explanation during last week's launch.
He pointed out that the inspection regime measures only the quality of services provided, rather than how well councils are meeting local needs.
'The story here is if you're in the system, actually the services you are receiving are getting better – those things that are provided by councils. But if you're outside the system the picture is much more stark and there are fewer people receiving those services than previously.'
It is a shortcoming graphically illustrated by adult social care, where authorities around the country are, by their own admission, responding to a funding crisis by tightening eligibility criteria and increasingly refusing services to all but the most vulnerable.
If you are an elderly person lucky enough to receive help it is likely to be of a high standard – but the chances are that many of your friends are getting no support at all.
Audit Commission chair Michael O'Higgins says the new inspection regime being introduced from 2009 will remedy the problem.
'At the moment we measure, in effect, what the system delivers,' he says. 'Under Comprehensive Area Assessments we'll be measuring what is available locally, whether in the system or not.'
But perhaps the damage has already been done by painting an incomplete picture of local services? Telling a dissatisfied public that their council is performing well might serve simply to foster scepticism about the results of inspection.
Certainly Corin Taylor, research director for campaign group the Taxpayers' Alliance, is unconvinced by the claims of stellar performance this year.
'Some councils are doing a good job, but in other cases they have doubled council tax while reducing services,' he says. 'Central government has placed a huge number of performance indicators and targets on councils, and as long as they tick the right boxes they get four stars.'
The current regime does take some limited account of the public's views, using data taken from the 2006 Best Value User Satisfaction Survey, which is fed into the environment, housing and culture service assessments. But these are not sufficiently weighted to have any real influence on the overall score.
The Audit Commission, which is designing the replacement CAA, intends to give much greater emphasis to user satisfaction ratings in the new system.
The Department for Communities and Local Government finished consulting just last week on its new Place Survey, which will gauge residents' perspectives on their local areas.
It will provide the data for 20 of the slimmed-down set of 198 Performance Indicators, which were published late last year. The commission will also use this information in the CAA ratings.
Ian Hickman, the commission's director of local government, told Public Finance: 'The intention is that the way the council engages with the public and sets its priorities will become much more central to the inspection process. We want councils to put people at the forefront of their activities.'
At the same time, the watchdog intends to overhaul its current method of reporting inspection results, which uses star ratings and direction-of-travel statements, to make it 'more meaningful' to the public.
'We're proposing we move to a narrative system, with green flags for good performance and red flags if there is a problem,' Hickman says.
Taylor is not convinced by this approach, either, because he believes that satisfaction surveys would still be too easy to manipulate.
'It would be very easy to set up a local satisfaction survey where the questions are skewed to produce the right results,' he says.
'We are dealing with completely intangible things, which are very difficult to measure and which may not even have much to do with what the council does or doesn't do.'
Hickman is confident that the commission's approach represents the best way forward, and suggests that the gap between the watchdog's conclusions and the public's perceptions will narrow over time.
'The issue is the time lag. It takes time for people to recognise that services have improved.'
As councils start gearing up for the local elections looming in May, many in the sector will be hoping Hickman is right.
PFfeb2008
