The newsletter from the North West and Efficiency Partnership           Issue 15 Feb' 10

Welcome to the NWIEP NOW! Comprehensive Area Assessment Special Edition

In this issue:

A Note from the Audit Commission

GONW: The Inside Story

NWIEP Perspectives

Help Offered!

Oldham Green Flag Case Study

Click here to find out how the region performed in the Area Assessments.

A Note from the Audit Commission...

The first CAA assessments were published on the Oneplace website  - www.direct.gov.uk/oneplace on 9 December, three years, one month and 12 days after the government published its White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities.

The Audit Commission, along with our five partner inspectorates, have assessed the performance of local public services working together to deliver improved quality of life. There are 23 different area assessments for the North West, 152 in total.

The launch of the Oneplace website - which had already recorded more than 150,000 unique visitors inside its first month - marks a more streamlined approach to regulation with auditors and inspectors publishing their findings together and making them directly available to the public in everyday language. Oneplace measures how well local services work together to meet both their own priorities and government indicators on a wide range of issues.

The website uses green flags to highlight exceptional performance others can learn from. Red flags signal where problems won’t be solved without a fresh approach by the local public services working together. In our region, there was much debate between the inspectorates and Local Strategic Partnerships about flags - 18 were red and 10 green. Health issues produced most concern and CAA Leads are now discussing the assessments with LSPs and monitoring how improvements are being planned.

In 2010 one option that is being debated is whether to move to regular updates during the year for the area assessments to keep them reasonably up to date. In addition other changes are being considered eg reviewing red flags in June and quarterly thereafter. In some cases, such as health, inspections will take place to further analyse issues and assist improvement plans. Unlike previous regimes, these will be more risk-based and tailored to local circumstances, and some will be delivered jointly by partner inspectorates. There is no ‘fixed’ national programme and they will be considered when there are real concerns about a specific performance issue.

There will of course be an election in 2010. The Conservatives have publicly said they are committed to abolishing CAA, but we do know there is strong and growing support for Oneplace. Even some CAA sceptics recognise it as a powerful tool for scrutiny and accountability and for making public services more transparent to taxpayers.

Oneplace doesn’t exist in a vacuum and it is not the only tool for accountability. Accountability comes from effective leadership, scrutiny and hard information about what resources are available in an area. Well informed local Area Scrutiny, led by councillors and extended to cover all aspects of local public services, has an important local role. There is already broad cross-party support – and a positive reception from many in local government - for Total Place, currently being trialled in 13 parts of the country. Total Place measures the economic inputs to areas and available resources, and seeks ways of streamlining to save taxpayers money. Alongside this we need independent, transparent assessment of whether local public services are actually delivering the outcomes they have set out to achieve for local people – including the most vulnerable.

So whatever changes are made to the way in which public services are scrutinised, we believe Oneplace has a significant contribution to make by -

• assessing what makes a real difference to people’s lives;
• looking at how public services work together;
• focusing on local, as well as national, priorities;
• providing robust, but proportionate, assessment of local services; and
• speaking directly to the public in straightforward language.

Terry Carter, Head of Operations (NW), The Audit Commission 

What it was like for us... 

The Inside Story from GONW

In Government Office we expected to be close to the CAA action, but not really part of it. After all, we are not inspectors and are not being assessed but our contact with councils and our knowledge of the Government’s expectations would provide a unique and balanced perspective that ought to help someone. My initial questions were how passive the role might be? And who should be setting the improvement agenda?  In the event we were a lot busier than I had anticipated. Here is our inside story...

Along with lots of people we looked forward to an improvement on CPA. A focus on local partnerships’ capacity to deliver the ambitious programmes of social change set out in 23 Sustainable Community Strategies seemed to be “just the ticket” and a welcome change from the historic analysis of process and a focus on institutions that seemed to characterise some aspects of the CPA.

We recognised the risks, of course. We wondered whether the Audit Commission could switch from retrospection to clairvoyance in the space of a few months and the immediate integration of the findings of 7 independent inspectorates into a single coherent report also seemed like a “big ask”.

April arrived and we were immediately conscious of colleagues in councils and the Commission settling into new roles. We gave a lot of thought to the quality of information the GO was able to provide, and whether this added value to published performance data. Relationships between individual locality managers and CAA Leads developed at different rates. The official start of CAA work coincided with the adoption of a new approach to locality management and some important changes in GO personnel. This may have exacerbated some of the uncertainty in the early days.

As the summer passed we tackled a little ambiguity over the respective roles of the various players but regular contact with all parties and some discussion with colleagues in our national network gave the GO a clear sense of our mission to

• offer robust and reliable information to CAALs;

• introduce CAALs to colleagues having more expert knowledge (particularly in relation to health) or detailed information; and

• help with “reality checking”.

We later added a fourth; to keep Ministers and Whitehall colleagues up to date and in touch with the local impact of the CAA process.

Although the initial discussion of “tags” was rather alarming (when my grand parents were young it was the map of the world that was coloured red, now it seemed to be just the North West Region) it did help in focusing on what we collectively didn’t know. On reflection the discussion of the nature of issues presented by the tags was a key stage in our process. It provided a better focused approach to work where the agenda had threatened to be unrealistically broad.

The exchange of information was an issue that led to a little tension within the GO. The Audit Commission were quite properly unable to share with third parties (including the Government) emerging judgements. This was sometimes at odds with a Whitehall presumption that all information, provisional findings and draft information would be readily available well in advance of publication.

We also gained the impression that local authority colleagues assumed that we knew more than we actually did. This is where our unexpected hard work arose as we sought updates on a voluntary basis from local authorities. We then sought to reassure colleagues in Government Departments that the information emerging from the process was largely a summary of known development areas, where improvement work was already in hand, rather than shocking revelations.

We tried to manage this role through maintaining transparent relationships with local strategic partnership colleagues. How did we do? Please let us know as we are eager to improve.

We leave the process with some key learning points:

• The CAA is an ambitious process that is designed to steer future development but inevitably some of the inappropriate comparison “baggage” of the CPA has been carried forward. We need to manage the perception of the purpose and nature of the exercise;

• It will be easier to do better in the future as everyone will be more familiar with the process and the pinch points;

• We will need to work harder to focus on the prospects of the wider partnerships rather than just the health of the local authorities; our language sometimes shows an excessive concentration on the latter; and

• The beneficial part of the process – when we structure improvement plans around information gleaned from the assessments – is about to begin but some of our language suggests that we “think it’s all over”. I am sure it is not!

Mike Chambers, Head of Partnerships, Government Office NW 

NWIEP Perspectives...

Click here to find out how the region performed in the Area Assessments.

The Sub-regional Story	Strategic Commissions
A Quick Dive in Cheshire and Warrington... We plan to use the result of the first CAA to start a debate and discussion about the future. Set aside any personal views about the way the process was for our partners, the teething problems and the issues with the results….we are where we are and we will focus on the future. We have already reflected on how we as the improvement & efficiency partnership work with our LSP’s. How do we share updates, align strategies and projects and look at the picture sub-regionally? What opportunities are there and what additional support can we lever in through the resources we each have access to? We don’t know the answer to all of these questions just yet…but we are working on it! And we are building our relationship with Government office and the Audit Commission to support the ‘improvement family’ collaborative, to develop a common understanding of the good, bad and the ugly, and take action accordingly. Much of the focus has been on the bad stories, the red flags, and we feel it has been a missed opportunity to understand and put forward the excellent work all of our partners have achieved. We will focus more on this in the future and tell the story and share the learning with others. There is much to do - and it sometimes feels like it is over and above the day job, however in time, we will reap the rewards of a stronger, more joined up approach, which is what CAA is all about. (Lesley Brown, CWIEP) All the sub regional partnerships will be providing support to public service partners in their localities to help tackle the key issues highlighted by the CAA.  This support will be tailored to meet the needs of the individual regions and will work on the themes that are most relevant to the particular areas. For More Information Contact... Cheshire Improvement and Efficiency Commission (CWIEC) Lesley Brown Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) Joanne Horrocks Cumbria Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (CIEP) Alan Cook Merseyside Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (MIEP) Stuart Flanagan Team Lancashire Jerry Smith	Work from the Partnerships Commission... The Partnerships Commission’s Rapid Response fund and learning programme will be used to address key themes arising from the CAA.  Sub regional groupings of Chief Executives are currently discussing how support can best be targeted.  We hope that these discussions will lead to the engagement of ‘thematic advisors’ for the major red/green flag/organisational assessment themes to work with clusters of authorities/LSPs. The Rapid Response fund is also being used to provide very specific support for a small number of authorities with more intense needs following CAA. A meeting of the regional LSP managers’ network on 14 December 2009 focused on an initial analysis of the CAA results.  We explored how CAA went across the region, discussed the lessons to be learned within the sector, and highlighted red / green flag  themes and other concerns. The network will go on to discuss the key themes in greater detail at future meetings.  It is also collecting, information on the Green Flags so that these can be turned into good practice case studies for sharing across the region and facilitating peer support between red and green flagged authorities. (contact Estelle Rowe 07830217612 for more details) (Estelle Rowe, Partnerships Commission) EVENTS... Impact of CAA on Procurement 18th February 2010, Wigan As part of the NWIEP Training Programme, this event will look at Use of Resources Key Lines of Enquiry and the impact of procurement on value for money and efficiency. Find out more >>> Housing Strategy: Facing the Future 31 March 2010, Manchester This event will assist councils and their partners in gaining knowledge of their new strategic housing role as set out by guidance released by the Audit Commission in January 2010. Find out more >>> More events >>>
Green Flag Case Study	Help Offered...
What makes a Green Flag green?  Oldham Partnership: Teenage Pregnancy Reduction In 1998 Oldham's teenage conception rate was 66.1 per 1,000 15-17 year old females.  Figures from May 2009 show that this has been reduced by 36.5% - second highest reduction over the period in the country. Read Oldham's case study to find out how they acheived this and gained a coveted Green Flag too... Read the case study >>> Looking for inspiration? We have a number of best practice reports and case studies.  Proud of your project? Want to share your experience and best practice with others? Our case studies template will help you get your thoughts down on paper. We will happily publish it on www.nwiep.org.uk	Individual Local Improvement Advisor Projects Resources are still available within the national fund for Local Improvement Advisors (LIAs).  LIAs can provide advice, coaching, training and mentoring to support local partnerships to deliver public services through the new performance framework and LAA/MAAs.  LIAs help local partnerships to connect their knowledge of problems and solutions with approaches that have worked elsewhere, and help them build their capacity to be self-sufficient. (contact Bernadette Hurst for more details) IDeA IDeA have taken a view on the wider themes which have come through the CAA process and are offering help on the topics of: crime reduction, health inequalities, housing, children's services, vulnerable adults, economy, community engagment and community cohesion. Click here to find out more For more information contact Howard Davis.

Find out more about how the North West Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (NWIEP) can support your local authorities to help themselves to deliver better services for local people at an affordable and sustainable cost. Visit www.nwiep.org.uk today.

This message was sent from NWIEP to a.mitton@wigan.gov.uk. It was sent from: Alexia Mitton, NWIEP, Wigan Investment Centre, Wigan, Lancs WN3 5BA, United Kingdom. You can modify/update your subscription via the link below.

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