07 November 2008
By David Scott
Devolution has resulted in significant differences in approach to audit and inspection across Britain, according to a new study.
Researchers in Edinburgh and Cardiff carried out a study into performance regimes and found that the greatest difference was in the approach to publishing comparative data.
They were critical of the Wales Programme for Improvement, pointing out that reports were not made public and that a dearth of data made it impossible to identify top performance on any systematic basis.
Sandra Nutley, professor of public management at Edinburgh University, told a meeting of the Scottish Policy Innovation Forum in Edinburgh that the 'audit and inspection explosion' in Britain had coincided with the creation of devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.
Devolution had resulted in the 'emergence of three increasingly distinctive approaches to public services improvement and, in particular, the inspection of local authorities', she added.
Nutley said that, at first glance, Best Value Audits in Scotland, Comprehensive Performance Assessment in England and the WPI looked very similar. But the publication of comparative performance data was the most eye-catching difference.
While Scottish and Welsh policy-makers did not use English star ratings to judge an authority's performance, there were important differences between their respective approaches.
Although there was no overall league table in Scotland, it was clear from BVA reports which local authorities were top performers and which were struggling. Audit Scotland was willing to publicly name and shame authorities it believed lacked effective leadership and corporate capacity.
Nutley said this was in contrast to Wales where 'the low-key approach to intervention means that failing councils can go largely unnoticed by the press or public'.
Nutley told Public Finance that diversity across the UK increased opportunities for learning more about what was effective.
'However, to capitalise on this learning potential we need much better sets of comparable public service performance indicators across the three countries – the dearth of such indicators has got worse since devolution,' she said.
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