How good are the services provided by public bodies like the Council, police, health service and schools?  It is not just a question of whether they meet the objectives they set for themselves: the targets for service outputs.  Are public services working effectively together for the benefit of residents?  Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) is the latest approach to finding the answer.  This briefing aims to explain what CAA is from the point of view of Birmingham residents.

Background: Best Value

The idea of ‘Best Value’ was first applied to local council services in the 1999 Local Government Act.  It said local councils and other public authorities (including police and fire authorities) had to show improvement in the value for money provided by the services they run.  Value for money means:

• ‘economy’ – the cost of things you buy in to deliver a service (including salaries);
• ‘efficiency’ – the way you manage resources (wasting as little as possible) so as to deliver service outputs
• ‘effectiveness’ – whether the service outputs you deliver meet the actual needs of local people.

It is the product of all three, so that,

The law said councils had to have effective ways of planning, monitoring, measuring and reporting on the performance of services they provide.  That included a regular review of the way they delivered services.  It included looking at alternative ways they could deliver services, for example, by paying voluntary and community groups to deliver them instead.  The law also says that councils must consult the public and interested parties on how services should be delivered.

Audit Commission and Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA)

The Audit Commission is the public body that looks into the quality of local services.    Since 2002 the Commission used an approach called Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) to do this.   CPA looked at whether a council had:

• a clear and shared vision for the people and area it serves and provides leadership;
• clear priorities, and a good strategy for implementing them;
• the capacity to make decisions in a clear and accountable way and put them into effect;

and  could show that it kept track of (and let others know) how its services were performing.

The Audit Commission also looked at:

• how service users felt about council services;
• whether the council was working well with partners;
• whether the council was making best use of its money;
• how the council tackled complex issues such as sustainability;
• whether the council was making a real difference to the quality of local life.

CPA graded the services provided by a local council out of four.  (Four stars was the highest score and one star was the lowest).  In some parts of the country there are district and county councils providing different services.  In places like Birmingham, however, there is only one level of local government.  CPA graded Birmingham on: Benefits (housing and council tax benefit are managed by the council); Children and Young People Services; Culture; Environment; Housing; Social Care for Adults; and Use of Resources – things like financial management and reporting, internal controls how well the Council managed and used its resources.

Improving, or Not?

Over the years, CPA has shown up some failings in services provided by local councils.  For example, in 2002 the Audit Commission gave Birmingham City Council an overall CPA score of  ‘weak’.  Up to 2005, the Audit Commission described Birmingham’s housing service and children’s social care as ‘poor’.  In general, though, CPA has charted improving standards.  There was, for example, a 15% increase in average best value performance indicator scores between 2000/01 and 2004/05.  Birmingham improved to be a 2 star council.  More and more councils scored 3, or 4, out of 4 stars.
Despite these improvements, public satisfaction with council services has remained low.  Many people feel they have no influence over decisions that affect where they live.  Despite the improvements measured by CPA, local services have not necessarily responded to local need.  On top of which, people’s expectations of public services have risen. People are now used to more choice and less waiting about.  We expect services to fit more easily with our lives – and not the other way around.

In response to these issues, more people who manage public services have increasingly recognised that the only way for public services to improve is to base them on the needs of citizens.  For example, the police now understand that community safety isn’t just about preventing and detecting crime.  It’s about how people feel about their neighbourhood and community.  That means the police working effectively with other agencies and the communities they serve.  How many times have failings in public services been blamed on the failure of communication between different agencies?  Despite these often high profile failures, local councils have been successful in recent years in making efficiency savings.  That is, getting more outputs for a given level of input.  More people agree the challenge for public services now is to find ways of adding value: rather than just churning out services in an efficient, machine way.

The contradiction between improving CPA scores and low levels of public satisfaction; the need to take into account the way people on the receiving end of services feel; the need for joined up responses to ‘big issues’; and the effect of CPA in making services mare narrowly efficient, but not necessarily more effective; together with the continuing need to improve services and to independently examine progress, are all factors that have led to an overhaul in the system for measuring Best Value.  Which is where Comprehensive Area Assessmnent (CAA) comes in.

Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA)

The new approach to judging Best Value is called Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA).   Using CAA, the Audit Commission will look into how well councils are working with other public bodies (like the police and local health services) to meet the needs of the people they serve.  CAA is a joint assessment made by a group of six independent bodies:  Audit Commission; the Care Quality Commission;  HM Inspectorate of Constabulary; HM Inspectorate of Prisons; HM Inspectorate of Probation; and Ofsted.

The idea is that CAA will look at what is achieved by local service providers from the point of view of local people.  That is, the people on the receiving end of services; rather than the people providing them.  So, rather than looking at, say, policing in isolation, CAA looks at how the effect of policing, housing, education and decisions about economic development and other factors all come together to impact on a community.

CAA in Practice

In practice, CAA is based on an area-wide assessment, eg of Birmingham as a whole.  The area assessment is supposed to be forward looking and focused on local priorities.  The assessment involves all of the inspection bodies and aims to answer three questions:
1.  How well do local priorities express community needs and aspirations?
2.  How well are the outcomes and improvements needed being delivered?
3.  What are the prospects for improvement?
are used to show where there is exceptional performance, improvement or innovation and significant concerns about future outcomes respectively.

CAA also includes organisational assessments (of the police, council etc).  These inform (and are informed by) the area assessment.  They are led by the relevant inspection body (Audit Commission for the local council etc).  They, however, focus on the contribution local bodies make to improving outcomes, as well as individual performance and value for money.
For local councils, organisational assessments include an assessment of how the council manages performance and using its resources.  There are joint assessments with Ofsted and Care Quality Commission for councils (including Birmingham) which provide children’s services and social care.  Service areas are graded – in a similar way to the CPA approach – on a scale of 1 to 4.
CAA looks at local performance management information, including that used for monitoring performance against Local Area Agreements and Sustainable Community Strategies.  That means looking at performance against the 188 indicators set out by government as part of the National Indicator Set.  CAA is also supposed to include evidence from inspection and audit; information from government offices and other agencies; and views of local people, the third sector and local businesses.

The key characteristics of CAA are that it aims:
1.    to assess what makes a real difference to people
2.    to look at how public services work together – as well as individual organisational performance
3.    to focus on particular local, as well as national, priorities
4.    to provide robust, but proportionate, assessment of local services
5.    to present assessments directly to the public in straightforward language

That is the theory: 2009 was the first year that CAA was undertaken.  The first CAA results appeared on a new oneplace website which was launched on Thursday 10 December 2009.  Results will be updated each year after that.

Areas to watch in future include:

• How local is local?  The aim is to give people a snapshot of quality of life in the area.  Area-wide assessments for a city the size of Birmingham, however, don’t tell you much about the experience of communities within the whole.
• The quantity of data needed means that the inspectors need to move to ‘ongoing dialogue’ with public services rather than intensive ‘inspection’. But honest dialogue depends on trust… will too much be taken on trust?
• Balancing Local and National.  Will the National Indicator set get more attention than the local priorities that CAA is supposed to focus on and where do those ‘local priorities’ come from?  Is it what local councillors think, or the local partnership – and what if local partnerships exclude people?
• Overcoming  the culture of measuring what is most easily measured will be a real challenge.  CPA has meant local public service providers care a lot about a few quantitative measures.  Can councillors and senior managers be enabled to look beyond them at the real effect of what they do?
• Transparency – the biggest opportunity for CAA is also its most pressing challenge.  Will it succeed in being visible and relevant to the public. The Audit Commission want to produce short, jargon free reports which will speak to the public in a language we understand about the issues in our communities.  Will they manage it?

FURTHER INFORMATION AND BACKGROUND

The Local Government Act 2000 gave local councils a general power of well-being.  That is, they can do anything likely to romote the economic, environmental or social wellbeing of their area.  This gave councils more leeway to come up with new ways of serving people.  But it also made it even more important that councils could show what they do really does meet local needs.  CPA, and now CAA, are attempts to do this.

The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 set out the new local performance framework of which the development of CAA is a key part.

OnePlace is the government website where details of CAA for each area are published.

The Audit Commission is public agency which drives economy, efficiency and effectiveness in local public services to deliver better outcomes for everyone.  www.audit-commission.gov.uk/caademo is a prototype of a joint inspectorate Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) reporting website.  It accompanies the CAA framework document.

The Care Quality Commission took over from the Commission for Social Care Inspection, Healthcare Commission and Mental Health Act Commission in April 2009.  It oversees the quality of health and care services in England.  http://www.cqc.org.uk
Ofsted is the public agency which inspects and regulates to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages.  www.ofsted.gov.uk
HMIC is the body which inspects and helps set standards for police forces  inspectorates.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmic

IDeA is the Improvement & Development Agency for Local Government.
CAA Now is an e newsletter published by Audit Commission with news and updates about CAA for anyone interested.

Details of the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessments (CPAs) of local councils (including Birmingham City Council for example) to 2008 are available from the Commission’s website www.audit-commission.gov.uk    There is information about past CPAs on Birmingham City Council’s website.