The new government has abolished Comprehensive Area Assessments. Hoorah. Public servants will be breathing a sigh of relief now that the burden of self-assessment, a costly exercise in representation rather than accuracy, has gone. The public couldn’t care less and those of us who know the ratings were at best spurious and at worst plain wrong will be pleased if the Audit Commission has its power to pontificate on management methods removed. CAA’s demise should herald the end of the era of compliance.
It represents an important opportunity for public service managers. They should assert their right to make their own decisions about how they are judged as managers. Matters of methods and measures should be their choice – that’s why they are employed. Many have already stood up to the Audit Commission, with evidence showing how following the Audit Commission inspectors’ guidance, nay obligations, created poor service and higher costs.
Responsibility, promised by the new government, is the foundation for innovation; it should be the hallmark of the new era. Those who have eschewed the Audit Commission’s bullying have not only argued with the inspector’s judgements, they have shown how better methods and measures have led to performance improvement of extraordinary proportions. To give just one example: housing repair costs halved while making extraordinary improvements to service (all repairs completed in three days or on the day required by the tenant).
Innovation will flourish in the new era provided the psychology changes from compliance to responsibility. But, no doubt, many will fear a ‘loss of control’. They should appreciate how the regime of compliance has driven our services out of control. And they should take comfort in the fact that the era of responsibility will make any weak managers easier to root out; with CAA and the other centrally-promulgated requirements, managers only needed to comply to be hidden. We should not fear loss of control, we should celebrate getting control in the right place.
Professor John Seddon is an occupational psychologist, researcher, and authority on change in the public sector. He is MD of Vanguard, visiting professor at Cardiff University Business School and author of several books including “Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, the Failure of the Reform Regime and a Manifesto for a Better Way” and “Delivering Public Services that Work”.
I hesitate to offer a correction to Professor Seddon who plainly is having a great time and good luck to him. But self-assessments are explicitly not part of the Comprehensive Area Assessment methodology (see page 12 of the recently issued CAA guidance).
As an Area Assessment Lead (for the moment) I think I might remember if I had asked for one. I have however been interested in the quality of self-assessments or evaluations done by the organisations with which I work. And so I should.
Many councillors and officers that I speak with use a variety of tools to understand their performance and the needs of their customers. I’ve used that work to help me answer the three essential CAA questions: Do priorities match the needs of the people? Is something actually being achieved? Is there evidence of learning that should be shared or fresh action that needs to be taken?
I hope that I, and my colleagues, have been sophisticated enough to worry more about what has been achieved rather than how. I’ll continue to cheerlead for innovation, achievement and responsibility. Given the scale of the public sector financial challenge we clearly will need a good dollop of all three.
I don’t hesitate to offer a correction to Michael Newbury, as a local authority policy officer working in the corporate office I think I DO remember being involved in producing self assessments by the bundle as CPA seamlessly became another set of intials, CAA.
They may not have been asked for, but the system is set up to produce them. Inspections and the audit regime are literal performance management, by their very nature a play that the inspected has to manage as a performance. The inspector-critic arrives, sharpened pencil at the ready, the inspected therefore need a script. What else are they to show the inspector? The actual work? Might be more useful, but crucially can’t be scored or even ‘flagged’. So out comes another self-assessment, for the critic to view and score.
This is the case whether an inspector is part of CAA/CPA/ISO/whatever. A visit, even an ‘ongoing conversation’ as I have heard them called, they require something to look at. Something to view and pore over. Something that could be emailed is even handier.
So no, you may not have asked for one, but they get produced.
I don’t doubt the ability of the inspector to spot the wool being pulled over his eyes. What I do doubt is his ability to understand the scale of the managing of the performance. What is on the stage is nothing compared with behind the scenes, the months of preparation, the backstage crew all pulling ropes and scenery setting, the whole performance being managed to an end of obtaining a number or a phrase or the avoidance of a “flag”.
Sadly, the play is is really a farce but without the wardrobes and trouser dropping, and thank God the curtain has finally come down on it all.
Good riddance to inspection and compliance in local government, and the pointless bureaucracy that went with it. Being inspected was a terrible experience for me and my team. The LGA estimated that in one county council area, the public bodies were collectively spending £3.6m annually on inspections. Now it’s time to start getting rid of some of the bureaucrats in Whitehall who dreamt up the targets and specifications in the first place.
Quote: ‘Good riddance to inspection and compliance in local government”. Indeed. Enough of all this ‘nanny-state’ governance, controls and compliance. You can’t beat a good dose of gay abandon and anarchy to ensure things get done!
Heaven help us. It’s this resistance to change and blindness that is the bane of local government in this country. Governance and compliance should not be bureaucratic. Governance and compliance are ‘enablers’ ensuring that you perform within safe boundaries and raise flags (sometime painful ones) if performance slips or costs rise.
I look forward to seeing how well local government performs in this New World – but I confidently predict the worst.
Quote: ‘Governance and compliance should not be bureaucratic. Governance and compliance are enablers.’ Indeed, as you say.
In Concerned Citizen’s statement ‘should’ and ‘are’ seem to be stated as fact, without reference to what ‘is’. I refer to my post and Chris Burfoot’s post which reference what was actually experienced under CAA. Not what should or would ideally have been the case.
I have mixed feelings about this. When I hear of a city council getting four stars in a Comprehensive Area Assessment and then I relate that to how they manage and lead their people – it just beggars belief to be honest. I work for a three-star organisation, but I can tell you from the inside that we had to argue with the Audit Commission to retain this – they were far from convinced. We recently had a mock inspection by a housing association that told us that our equalities policies and practices were strong. I can tell you that they are not!
What worries me though is that in the current public sector climate with lots of different forms of governance. I worry that senior managers in particular are becoming less accountable to users – not more so. We still need a mechanism to hold chief executives and the senior management team accountable – CAA or no CAA or Audit Commission. John Seddon must surely know as a psychologist of the human frailties of corporate leadership – these highly paid people can make catastrophic mistakes for which others pay.
There should be less reliance on observing policy and organisational structure by inspection and performance regimes and deeper analysis and requirements about the outcomes of policy and practice. This was the way the Tenant Services Authority was going and Seddon himself said at an inaugral lecture at the University of Derby that this approach was very promising. Now with the Tory/Lib-Dem axis, it seems the TSA is for the chop. We still need some sort of vigilance to hold organisations to account for performance and assess value for money (I’m ex-private sector, and the stuff my organisation wastes money on is simply criminal). Any future quality assurance regime for the public sector must look at customer- centred outcomes and not processes if it is to be truly effective – for all our sakes.
InsideOutman has hit the nail on the head: “We still need a mechanism to hold chief executives and the senior management team accountable”. It is difficult to see how local democrats are going to be able to hold these executives to account without the national performance indicators and benchmarks which George Osborne et al are so enthusiastically discarding.
I suspect the only winners in all this are these executives who, with greater information to hand and with greater expertise than local councillors, will no longer be effectively challenged.
The private sector has the market to drive performance. The public sector had performance indicators, benchmarking; and local accountability. Once these are gone, where next for public sector improvement?
Improvement does not come from the regulatory bodies. Many even misled us. Improvement comes from us. We make the change by learning new knowledge, monitoring and evaluation, researching and testing new ideas and skills, and by challenging one another. Outcomes are determined by people whom we serve and work with, not the regulatory bodies. I hope the CQC, IDeA and EHRC will learn from this lesson as well. Their guidance and frameworks are not and should not be treated as tablets of stone.