A weapon of mass distraction?

Far from adding value, I think CAA may be in danger of becoming an irrelevance, devouring time and resources that could be better deployed on the wider improvement and efficiency agenda.

And whatever is said about CAA being an assessment of partnership performance, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that it is local councils with their explicit place-shaping role that are immediately in the firing line.

These concerns were reinforced during a recent CAA feedback session in Brent in which questions were raised by the Audit Commission’s representative about the local strategic partnership’s response to the recession.

The truth of course is that every major agency in the borough is grappling with the consequences of therecession every single day and we are all having to think the unthinkable as we prepare for the post-election clampdown on public expenditure - whichever party winsthe general election.

Radical response

Against a sombre economic background, reflected by a 10% rise in benefit claimants over the last year, Brent LBC has been developing a radical response to the challenging financial times.

Last autumn we launched an ambitious improvement initiative and have committed to a £50m minimum four year cost reduction programme that seeks, as far as practicable, to shelter council services and employment from the worst consequences of the economic downturn.

We are now working hard to turn this broad strategy into a practical programme of work and we will shortly be launching a detailed Improvement and Efficiency Action Plan at our annual senior management conference this month.

In my view, Brent LBC has acted decisively and responsibly in facing the very difficult times ahead, so it is just a little irksome to be accused by the Audit Commission of dragging our heels.

But it isn’t just the questioning of our response to the recession that has caused me to doubt the CAA process.

Challenges

I assume that one purpose of the process is to hold a mirror up to the borough and its many challenges but all I have ‘learnt’ in practice is that Brent is a relatively deprived outer London borough with many inner London characteristics, a hugely diverse local demography and a population with an ever-expanding appetite for more and better public services.

This is scarcely news to me or any of my agency partners. These facts are the bread and butter of our daily lives — we do not need CAA to tell us what we already know.

Frankly, this recent experience has left me and other agency colleagues rather underwhelmed. I have worked in Brent for 23 years and been the council’s chief executive since 1998. I have a hard-working and creative team of colleagues within the council and many equally talented senior colleagues in our partner agencies.

We are all well aware of the many difficulties of working in this spirited but challenging local community and we really don’t need the commission or anyone else to lecture us about them.

I have no problem at all with constructive criticism from any quarter if it helps us to improve but the CAA process actually offers us nothing of practical value as far as I can tell.

Alternative universe

Another concern about CAA is that it effectively posits an alternative universe that I simply do not recognise. In the commission’s world view, we are all supposed to be upper quartile performers working through an all-powerful quasi-parliamentary local partnership that somehow manages to reconcile a raft of conflicting agency priorities, accountabilities and funding streams in a way that government itself has conspicuously failed to do at a national level.

Far from adding value, CAA is distracting us from the real challenges

Gareth Daniel, Chief executive, Brent LBC

While being urged to excellence in all areas - not a bad thing in itself of course - the CAA process remains blind to the many financial, political, operational and community issues local government managers have to wrestle with all the time.

The world that I inhabit is a complex and quixotic one in which all sorts of conflicts, tensions and competing ambitions have to be worked through. If all I had to do was keep the commission happy, my job would be plain sailing, but sadly life is not quite that simple.

Brent has always supported strong partnership working and we have very wellestablished joint working arrangements with all of our main partners in the public, private, not-for-profit and third sectors.

Many of these pre-date the discovery by the government of the value of local partnership working including, for example, ourlocal crime and community safety partnership, which was set up many years before formal crime and disorder reduction partnerships were required by statute.

Desire

Our nationally recognised work on neighbourhoods and estate renewal has been driven by our desire to improve the life chances of local people and make good things happen on the ground — not by some self-serving desire to score brownie points with ministers and civil servants.

But in Brent we are also experienced enough to recognise that even good partnerships have their limitations, if only because their leaderships inevitably have many different reporting lines, funding mechanisms and policy priorities.

The Audit Commission paradigm appears to be one in which an omniscient local strategicpartnership pulls invisible levers and somehow differences of agency outlook are magically negated.

This has not been our experience in Brent. The challenge for LSPs is to maximise the area of shared consensus and joint working but I have seen no evidence that even strong partnerships have managed to eliminate the ever-present differences and tensions between agencies altogether.

Oppressive

What increasingly worries me is the way in which CAA effectively insinuates itself between the political and officer leadership of the council. I am employed by Brent LBC (not the LSP, please note) to deliver the policy programme and priorities of the elected local administration. I am clear about my role and to whom I am accountable.

But I am now feeling as though I am tasked by the commission to address their priorities, their targets, and their indicator sets even though they have very little local knowledge and no democratic mandate.

And it’s not just CAA that feels oppressive. The way in which ‘use of resources’ judgements are being arbitrarily downgraded as part of some post-Icelandic banks bar-raising exercise makes me feel we are doomed to fail even if our objective performance — as is the case in Brent — is actually improving.

Early reports suggest a similar process may be taking place with unannounced child protection inspections. Far from encouraging councils to improve, CAA is indanger of distracting and demoralising staff precisely at a time when councils need their workforce to be more committed than ever before.

Cynical

Who is surprised that many council officers now feel a tad cynical about the whole process?

That said, I do not support some of the recent criticisms of the commission — there needs to be an effective national body that oversees the billions of pounds of public expenditure for which local councils are responsible.

There are also many good and able people at the commission, from its chief executive downwards. And over the years they have produced some excellent and well-researched national studies from which the whole sector has benefited.

But it is not acceptable for the commission to impose its edicts on local political direction or to advocate improvement from the sidelines while doing nothing practical to promote it.

Nor is it their job, in my opinion, to second-guess operational priorities and choices that are quite properly made within individual councils and partnerships.

At a time when ‘localism’ is fashionable in all the main political parties, it is also time councils were given the respect they have earned through the tangible performance improvements that have undoubtedly been made across the country over more than a decade.

Gareth Daniel, Chief executive, Brent LBC

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