For Good Measure

Devolving Accountability for Performance and Assessment to Local Areas

Author: Sir Simon Jenkins, Tom Shakespeare, James Morris   |   02/02/2010

This report is a contribution to the debate on the future of local government performance and assessment. In it we outline our vision for reducing the burden of inspection on councils, while simultaneously increasing local accountability and the level of sector led assistance and support. Among a whole range of potential benefits of this new system, we foresee that the performance of local government will increase; the cost of bureaucracy and compliance will decrease; and the tools for a new wave of citizen-led participation will have been given to local residents. These changes are designed to sit within the context of a vision for a new kind of state, in which local government both takes more power from central government, and simultaneously fosters an environment of citizen activism.

Headline findings:

• The performance of local government will be increased by reducing the burden of inspection – The current performance regime has led to measures becoming targets. Those targets have distorted the actions of local government. We set out a framework to create a non-prescriptive performance framework which is designed to increase local accountability and a sector led approach to assessment. The national indicator set should be slimmed down, and a system put in place to ensure that the measures are put through a rigorous check before becoming standardised.
• Increasing the level of local government accountability to local residents will have a number of benefits including improved performance – We make a number of recommendations for how local accountability could be increased including releasing financial expenditure to the public, communicating the strategy and decision making process to the public and increasing access to information on the core interests of local residents.

Headline recommendations:

• The CAA should not be mandatory, and councils should be encouraged to opt out of it – Councils can choose to have external audits of performance should they so wish. They will still be audited on their financial accounts. And they must also choose their own measures to drive up performance.
• All councils will be required to carry out a self assessment of their own performance – This will feed directly into their strategy and determine their use of measures to increase performance. The strategy will be fully locally determined, with no central interference.
• Councils will be required to release more information to residents – This will begin with financial expenditure information over œ500, and information about the work of elected officials.
• The National Indicator Set should be overhauled – 25 indicators will immediately be deleted from the NIS, and all other indicators and central targets will have to go through a rigorous check based on: public interest; whether they are required to measure minimum standards; or going forward, whether they are used as the basis for many councils own measures of performance. The data will form an ever evolving ‘Local Indicator Set’ which should be collated and released on a single website for public interest. See figure 4.
• Central government should cede more powers to local government in line or at a faster rate than with increases in local accountability – Accountability without the ability to change those things over which they are held to account both damages performance and undermines the case for localism.

Click here to view the press release