3 February 2010
Shadow communities secretary Caroline Spelman has tentatively backed the Audit Commission’s new website containing council performance data.
Her comments came in a week when the local authority regulator came under fire for its Comprehensive Area Assessment inspection regime, and separately for a study it commissioned from a political consultancy firm.
Speaking at the launch of a report on the CAA by the think-tank Localis, Spelman said: ‘[The Oneplace website] is a fairly simplified tool, it costs a lot less than CAA, but I think it’s an indication by the Audit Commission that they’re looking at other ways of providing helpful measuring without this invasive, burdensome, disproportionate-to-risk system we have at present.
‘It’s worth looking at.’
She highlighted the site’s use of publicly available data to compare councils, and its focus on locally agreed strategic priorities.
But she called for the CAA, whose assessments provide much of the data published on Oneplace, to be dismantled.
The Localis report, For good measure, published on February 2, argued that centrally imposed targets have distorted the actions of local authorities.
It recommended that the CAA be made non-compulsory, although mandatory financial auditing should remain. Instead, councils should carry out self-assessments and publicly disclose all financial expenditure over £500.
But Tony Travers, local government expert at the London School of Economics, told the launch that it was ‘inevitable’ that any government would retain inspection.
‘If it wasn’t the Audit Commission, it would be someone else,’ he said, praising the watchdog for having handled centralised inspection in the ‘least worst way possible’.
Spelman’s comments on Oneplace marked a change in tone from earlier in the week, when she had condemned the Audit Commission for abusing taxpayers’ money in hiring Connect Public Affairs.
The firm, which offers ‘bespoke political monitoring’ to various public sector bodies, unions and interest groups, was founded by Rosie Winterton, now a Labour local government minister.
The commission’s communications department paid a total of £55,616 to the company for services, including a study on political expectations for the CAA. But the resulting report, which cost £9,000, reportedly included recommendations on ‘how to combat the activities of Eric Pickles’, the Conservative Party chair and outspoken opponent of the CAA.
An Audit Commission spokesman strongly denied that Connect had been brought in to lobby members of the Opposition.
He also promised that the CAA, which is now entering its second year, would become less burdensome on well-performing councils. ‘Places and organisations providing good quality, value-for-money services will find inspection less onerous,’ he said.
