Assessment can be made to count
Implications of the CAA
Author: Tom Shakespeare, Local Government Chronicle |
When the words ‘performance management’ are uttered, one does not usually start leaping to the sky with excitement.
It often conjures up images of bureaucrats and auditors coming up with increasingly intrusive and dull ways of misrepresenting and misunderstanding the work of an organisation.
They emit an aura of Stalinist obsession with central control.
This interpretation would naturally lead us to be sceptical about the value of performance management, and is probably why the reaction to comprehensive area assessment (CAA) has been less than euphoric in certain circles.
But the truth is that performance management is incredibly important. Ultimately, the choice of what to measure and assess is what matters.
The best drivers for action come when there are clear lines of accountability and when the relevant information is in the hands of the people who hold them to account.
When this works well, it is a powerful tool for improvement.
When it doesn’t, it distorts the actions of local government and creates an ever-increasing distance between councils and the people they represent.
This is demonstrated by a box-ticking culture and increases in council ‘performance’ being accompanied by decreases in citizen satisfaction.
So the questions that need to be asked of the new performance management regime are:
Will performance be accountable to the right people?
Will it provide clearer lines of accountability?
Are the measures of performance relevant and meaningful?
Arguably, ensuring the information is relevant and meaningful to what local government is trying to achieve is the most important and difficult aim.
Information can actually distort actions if not used intelligently.
There is no better example of this than the most widely used of all economic measures ? gross domestic product (GDP), which has become a buzz word for economic growth and progress.
But, as the creator of GDP, Simon Kuznets, said in his report to the US Congress in 1934: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”.
Yet we have become obsessed with it. And this is also true of some of the indicators in the national indicator set (NIS) for local government.
The recent drive for change has been upon the number of indicators. However, we need to be far less obsessed by the number of indicators used as the basis for performance management, and far more obsessed with the effect that measuring has.
Local area agreements and the new CAA certainly recognise the wider role of local authorities to a larger extent and this is to be welcomed. But I would argue that it will never be truly coherent until accountability is made explicitly clear.
And therein lies the problem.
The confusion over responsibility between the various levels of government makes accountability diffi cult to determine, and ultimately impossible to audit.
The CAA itself may go some way to making the overall goals clearer. But it is still not obvious who should be aiming for these goals, and for whose benefit.
Are councils accountable to central government or local people?
Who is responsible for health, or education, or crime?
How can we encourage citizens to be more involved in local politics?
These are fundamental questions which must be answered for any performance management system to be effective.
Nobody can doubt that CAA is an improvement on comprehensive performance assessment.
But when the performance management system is more advanced than the system it is designed to assess, problems will inevitably arise.
It is for that reason that advancing any performance management regime too far should be treated with caution.
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