CPA - The Next Steps
Consultation on singly tier and county council CPA strategy 2003 to 2010
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is pleased to have this opportunity to respond to the Audit Commission on the above publication (the consultation paper). These comments have been prepared in consultation with members of the ACCA's Public Sector Technical Committee, a group of experienced accountants working in the public sector.
We believe that the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) has only met some of its original objectives. The fact that the Audit Commission is consulting on a revised strategy at such an early stage in its introduction suggests that this has not been without problems. In retrospect, it is clear that the Commission was given an almost impossibly short time-scale to introduce such a scheme and should have insisted on being given a longer lead time to develop a more robust approach.
The CPA assessments of single tier and county councils have shown it is possible for the Audit Commission to report to residents about the overall performance of their local authority. The publication of CPA scores seems, however, to have made little local impact and the exercise has resulted in little local media coverage or debate.
Local authorities provide a wide range of services, but only a few are actually used by a resident at any one time. In addition, the perception of the performance of these particular services may differ widely from the overall CPA score reported for the authority. Thus the results of the exercise often lack credibility when compared with an individual's own experience of the quality of services provided by their authority.
We do not consider that the introduction of CPA has enhanced local accountability. The system is too broad and, in some areas at least, has distorted relationships between local councillors and their electorate. Local democracy has been further undermined as residents are confirmed in their belief that their vote makes little difference because their local authority has little freedom and central, rather than local, government makes most policy decisions. Under the CPA process the accountability of a local authority is clearly to central government, not to its local electorate.
The introduction of CPA has, however, helped to bring together and integrate the reports from the range of local inspection agencies which now exist and this, we believe, was probably the Government's prime objective for its introduction. Central Government had already embarked on a policy of intervention in the provision of individual services which local authorities were judged to be failing to deliver successfully. CPA provided a rationale for whole authority intervention in terms of the reported corporate assessment score.
CPA has certainly allowed central Government to differentiate between poor and excellent authorities in terms of the overall quality of services, thus justifying intervention in terms of the former and additional freedoms for authorities in the latter category.
We believe, however, that CPA is not sufficiently integrated with other initiatives for local authorities. Clearer links should be made with the best value process and the CPA process should explicitly take account of each authority's best value performance plan and its best value performance indices. The CPA process should also be amended to ensure that it supports and integrates the provision of local services with major central Government initiatives, for example, e-government, lifelong learning and social exclusion. Consideration should also be given to aligning the timing of the reporting of an authority's CPA score with its local electoral cycle.
The Benefit Fraud Inspectorate is clearly, and perhaps quite rightly, obsessed with fraud prevention. The inspection of the quality of a local authority's benefit services has, however, to balance this perspective with that of service provision and the perception of this by individual claimants.
The Government now has some difficulty on how to proceed with CPA. The original plan was for CPA to be an annual process. This cannot be sustained as it uses too many resources and it is not practical to give and take away freedoms from local authorities year by year. Clearly a three-year cycle would be more realistic. A corporate assessment of each local authority should be undertaken automatically every three years. Inspections of individual services should take place on existing cycles. Then the three yearly corporate assessment of the overall position should be based on the latest of these reports.
In excellent authorities however, the plans and inspection reports will no longer be available and some sort of peer review backed by local minor inspections will be inevitable to ensure the current status of these authorities is properly assessed.
There is a danger at the moment that authorities assessed as excellent or poor will remain permanently in these categories. The suggested scoring rules, and especially those for progression from one category to another, appear to be overly complex and may be seen as inequitable as it will result in authorities which gain identical scores being assigned to different categories.