Agenda item

Further to Minute No. C205 of the meeting of Cabinet held on 6th April, 2011, Deborah Fellowes, Policy Manager, presented the submitted report which indicated that, despite the abolition of national performance and inspection frameworks such as Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) and Local Area Agreements (LAA), there was still an expectation from Central Government that Councils would take responsibility both collectively and individually to manage their performance, ensure improved outcomes for their local areas and deliver services with increased accountability and transparency. 

The Local Government Group (LG Group) paper ‘Taking the Lead: Self Regulation and Improvement in Local Government’ set out an approach to meeting these expectations which was summarised and recommendations made for its proposals to be adopted and taken forward as a Council wide project led by the Performance and Quality Team.

The report set out further information relating to:-

·              The Role of Individual Authorities.

·              The Role of the Local Government Group which was made up of several organisations including the LGA and IDeA and functioned as an integrated lobbying and improvement organisation for the local government sector.  ‘Taking the Lead’ set out the means by which the group would support self regulation and improvement as follows:-

Ø            Local Accountability Tools – Development of web based, free of charge tools to enable Councils to work with local people, partners and communities to produce a shared assessment of current performance.

Ø            Peer Challenge – LG Group was offering all Councils one free of charge peer challenge over the three year period beginning April, 2011. This would require a level of commitment from participating local authorities to provide high quality peers. Peer reviews may be tailored to suit local needs but would focus on corporate capacity and leadership. More subject specific peer challenge would be available, but these would not be free of charge.

Ø            Knowledge Hub – A free of charge web based tool to be operational fully by September, 2011 that would enable sharing of information,  knowledge, networking and collaboration.

Ø            Data and Transparency – A free of charge area within the Knowledge Hub where Councils may lodge and access data in particular to enable benchmarking. It was proposed that this was used to store data on a core of agreed metrics around cost efficiency and productivity, outcome and achievement and citizen satisfaction, but with the service offering the availability to go beyond these measures.  

Ø            Leadership Support – Ongoing development support for political and managerial leaders e.g. through the Leadership Academy and Leeds Castle programmes. The LG Group would continue to provide leadership support for political leaders and would be making available one subsidised place for every Council for each of the next three years on one of the main programmes commissioned from the market.   

Ø            Learning and Support Networks – Ongoing support of officers and councillor networks at national and sub-national levels. LG Group would seek to make use of these networks to inform its wider policy and lobbying role.

·              Local Government Group Improvement Programme Board.

·              Role of Audit and Inspection.

·              Role of Central Government.

·              Next Steps - It was advised that all local authorities participate to some degree in the arrangements proposed by the LG Group in particular as a means of developing local improvement and accountability, but also as a collective means of providing assurance to Central Government and of avoiding the return of burdensome inspection regimes and intervention.  For Rotherham Council it was recommended that the following initial priorities should be taken forward by the Performance and Quality Team:-

Ø            Submit this paper to a joint  Cabinet and SLT meeting for further discussion.

Ø            Raise general officer and member awareness of the LG Group ‘offer’ e.g. via Departmental Management Team meetings, M3 Manager Briefings and for Councillors via the Members’ Training and Development Panel.

Ø            Utilise the various LG Group improvement, self assessment and information tools as they became available.

Ø            Ensure local participation in data sharing systems such as the Knowledge Hub thereby contributing to the ongoing development of benchmarking information for the local government sector in the absence of any further Audit Commission quartile data.

Ø            Investigate local capacity for providing high quality peers to deliver challenge to other Councils.  

Ø            Explore the opportunity for a peer review for children’s services as notified to the Minister when the Authority came out of Government intervention.

There were no financial issues related to this report.

Local authorities seen to be opting out of the scheme could be more vulnerable to poor performance and, more importantly, poor reputation.

Current budgetary and resource pressures could impact on the extent to which the Council was able to contribute staff to Peer Challenges of other local authorities.

Discussion and a question and answer session ensued and the following issues were covered:-

-          need to begin sorting out local regulation in advance of any national regulation which could add value

-          reconciling the continuing need for external audit of local authorities and the proposed abolition of the Audit Commission

-          continued appeal process to the Secretary of State when challenging a regulatory decision

-          need for a robust Members’ Training and Development Panel

-          potential to opt out of the self regulation process

-          extent of the ‘free of charge’ offers and ‘real’ cost of self regulation

-          need to review what was desired to be kept from the useful activity over the last decade

Resolved:- (1) That the information be noted.

(2) That further progress reports be submitted to this Committee on the work being done.