A new regime

On 5 March the Audit Commission published its last set of Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) results. A new inspection regime – Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) – starts in April with the first results due to be published in November.

The Audit Commission was in self-congratulatory mood when the results were announced, pointing out that these were the best results since CPA was introduced in 2002 and a firm indicator that the inspection regime had widely improved town hall performance. For the third year in succession no local authority had been awarded the dreaded zero-star rating, while 62 had achieved the top grade of four stars, almost three times the number that were judged excellent in 2002.

‘As we say goodbye to the star rating system, it is heartening to see a record number of four-star councils, and 28 rising by one or more categories in this last year alone,’ said the Audit Commission chairman, Michael O’Higgins. ‘There will be many others who, although they have improved their performance, didn’t quite make it into the next division.’

All of which rather begs the question, if CPA is so effective in monitoring and improving local authority performance, why is it being replaced? Part of the answer can be found in the failures – the four councils (Haringey, Doncaster, Surrey and Milton Keynes) that fell from a three-star rating to one star. These authorities all plummeted in their overall ratings because of poorly performing children’s services, especially relating to the safeguarding of vulnerable children.

The important thing to recognise here is that the children’s services of these councils hadn’t suddenly deteriorated in the past 12 months. The inspectorate simply hadn’t picked up their shortcomings in previous reports. As the Baby P case in Haringey concentrated minds and attention, the inspectors began to dig deeper and weaknesses in the system that had previously gone undetected were highlighted. Four local authorities took a hammering, but March’s CPA results showed a dip in children’s services provision right across the board.

The accuracy and value of CPA ratings have long been questioned. For seven years they have painted a picture of improved performance that runs in direct contradiction to surveys that show public satisfaction with council services has actually been falling. Four-star local authorities have not always been endorsed by the ballot box either; their elected members tossed out by voters on issues that have slipped below by their inspectorate’s radar.

If your council is judged to have excellent education provision but you can’t get your kids into the school of your first, second or even third choice, that’s not going to cut much ice when the time comes to vote. If your local authority is commended for keeping council tax down but is charging swingeing rates for car parking and slapping an £80 fine for overstaying a meter by three minutes, you won’t feel well disposed towards the powers that be. If your benefits office is getting top marks for the speed with which it processes applicants, but proves hopelessly inadequate in the accuracy of its assessments, its CPA rating means nothing.

Whether the new CAA regime will address the weaknesses and anomalies of the old CPA one remains to be seen. It would be foolish to prejudge the system before it’s even kicked into place. Certainly, its heart seems to be in the right place, in that it aims to look at how people are affected by local services and provision, rather than a top-down tick-box assessment of individual council performance.
The approach is more holistic and wide-ranging but council leaders and managers desperately hoping for a break from the time, effort and bureaucracy involved in satisfying the inspectorate’s demands could be forgiven for being nervous. The aim to join up how local services operate – from education to health, police to fire and rescue, housing to benefits – is commendable, but it requires a joined-up inspection regime.

There are no fewer than seven inspectorates involved in developing CAA: the Audit Commission, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the Healthcare Commission, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, HM Inspectorate of Prisons,  HM Inspectorate of Probation, and Ofsted. That’s an awful lot of central government bodies – some of which haven’t proved themselves notably efficient in the past – that are being asked to work together to deliver what the Audit Commission describes as ‘giving citizens, service users and taxpayers a clear story about the places they live’.