I used to think journalists were great ecologists, when I was one – they were forever recycling old material. But John Seddon’s letter in Public Finance (‘Audit Commission needs to back off’, July 17) offered you yet another version of what he’s been recently pushing around the local government press, which he has been flogging for a long time. It’s a dead horse.
He paints a picture of a Trojan Audit Commission, smashing through the municipal thickets, then (he’s a great one for mixed metaphors) applying electrodes to all town and county managers so they all think the same.
What an insult to local authority executives. But they will know Seddon’s game: he is a salesman. Serious misunderstandings ruin his letter. Audit Commission studies are just that – empirical surveys of what local bodies are doing, organised around the pursuit of best value for money practice. We don’t prescribe; we analyse and point to places where superior performance is evident. Instead, Seddon says: ‘Don’t examine experience, follow the Vanguard.’
His onslaught on audit is even more puzzling. ‘Freeing managers from the burden of preparing for audit’ is a mantra that might have gone down well in the banks, but cannot be a guide to how public spending is appraised. The Audit Commission, for the record, does not ‘performance manage’ councils. Responsibility for local authorities lies with elected councillors – a vital group of people, incidentally, whose absence from Seddon’s view of the world is both odd and telling.
David Walker is managing director, communications and public reporting, at the Audit Commission
For the record, the Today programme invited Walker and me to a debate on air. He declined.
David. Why not have a think about what John is actually saying rather than making an ad hominem argument? Responsibility for services may lie with elected local councillors; but the customer of their services is the citizen. The purpose of a council’s service needs to be defined from the citizens point of view…
David Walker seems like a man who still believes the world is flat when we all know it is round. The audit commission drives wasteful activity into local authorities and sub optimises our performance in terms of what our customers, the local community, need. David – do all of us local authority managers a favour – instead of engaging in personal attacks, listen to what John has to say with an open mind. You will learn a lot, and it may stop the criminal waste of public resource that setting dubious targets and proscribing spurious method is doing.