The world has changed considerably since the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) sent a team of local government officers and members on the road in 1999.
The plan was to offer constructive advice and guidance to authorities on how to improve. And the concept remains popular, despite the different realities of modern municipal life.
Gone is the Audit Commission, with its formal inspection of councils and gone too, are the pre-austerity days of funding for councils.
The peer review process, now managed by the Local Government Association (LGA) since the IDeA was brought in-house, stands alone to shine a light into the corporate efficiency of individual councils.
The LGA is now about to launch an internal review of its peer challenge process and, while the general consensus is that it has offered significant benefits to the sector, there are still a number of misgivings.
Some question whether the process is sufficiently robust to give the sector, the public and the Government confidence that struggling councils can be guided away from the cliff edge in the current tough financial climate.
A number of authorities have avoided the scrutiny of a peer challenge for several years and when it has come, in the case of Northamptonshire CC, it has been too late to avert collapse.
The MJ columnist and former IDeA stalwart, Paul Wheeler, said: ‘As a concept they’re brilliant. The best ways of changing an organisation is not by external threat but by self-improvement.
‘But it’s gone from being the jewel in the crown of the IDeA, where there was lots of investment put in, to being just one of the things they do.’
He criticised the influence councils have over the selection of the scrutiny team and its ability to alter the final report, as well as the voluntary nature which allows failing authorities to dodge the bullet.
‘It’s got to be robust, independent and it’s not got to be optional.’
But Dennis Skinner, head of improvement at the LGA, dismissed suggestions that the voluntary nature of the scheme means failing authorities avoid the challenge.
‘There are now fewer than 50 councils that have not had a corporate or finance peer challenge over the last five years,’ he said.
‘All of these have either had a different form of peer challenge – for example children’s and adults’ (services) – or are engaged with sector-led improvement in other ways, for example, participating in our leadership programmes.’
When it comes to the ability of councils to shape the challenge team, Mr Skinner said: ‘The decision on the composition of teams is not one for the council. It is a joint decision by the LGA and the council.
‘It is right that the councils being peer challenged have some say on some of the team composition, as it is about getting the right peers for each council to ensure an effective and robust team, with the necessary credibility to land important messages with the council.’
But despite the LGA’s defence of the process, Mr Wheeler is not alone in his concerns over its current form. Another local government source argues there is a need to recognise the responsibility of every peer review to the wider local government sector.
‘My view is don’t be inspectors, but do take both challenge and support seriously,’ they said, ‘because it is also about the sector as a whole that adds a little extra responsibility on the team.
‘This needs to stiffen their backbone to say: “No, we are going to say this and say it in this way”.’
And, while Mr Skinner argued that 99% of reports are made public, there are some in the sector who are concerned over the failure of this to happen every time and for the language sometimes to be difficult to decipher for the untrained eye.
The same source said: ‘I don’t think this is ever supposed to be our version of an inspection system.
‘It remains something designed to challenge people constructively to drive improvement, but we should aim for transparency. And it’s also important that they are plain and the team doing it feel able to express their views, not one that is foisted on them by somebody else.’
This was at the heart of the controversy that emerged when The MJ revealed the peer review into Liverpool City Council in 2018 had led to the authority putting pressure on the review team to water down the findings.
But for the leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition at Liverpool, Cllr Richard Kemp, it was the fact information was leaked to the public that caused the problem.
Councillor Kemp, a former LGA Liberal Democrat leader and veteran of peer reviews, said: ‘The report is always written in a way not only to say what we’ve found but also how do we describe what we’ve found to help move the council forward, and that can’t happen easily in the full light of day.
‘We can’t sort out an entire large council in four days – we are going to make some mistakes. So there is always an element of ping-pong or to-ing and fro-ing.’
What is clear is that local government is happy with sector-led improvement and for many the process has been extremely positive.
Suffolk CC went through a peer challenge last year and for chief executive Nicola Beach it was ‘constructive’, as it had been when she was in charge at Braintree DC.
‘With good relationships with members, nothing was horribly broken.
‘It was about where we could improve and in both cases they have led to action plans and things we are doing differently as a result of it.’
Ms Beach can see the case for making the process mandatory, but highlights issues. ‘I think there should be questions asked of authorities that haven’t had one at all,’ she said. ‘But they may have had some regional sector-led improvement work done and it may be that that’s where they decided they needed to put their efforts.’
In addition, she pointed out that a mandatory process could lead to issues such as having enough peers to take part in challenge teams.
Then there’s the fact that the process depends on people being open and honest. A mandatory system could lead to a hostile environment which undermines positives currently enjoyed through the voluntary approach.
This leaves the problem of how the sector gets reluctant authorities facing difficulty to put themselves forward for challenge.
Mr Skinner stated a mandatory process would run counter to ‘the principle of sector-led improvement’ and Cllr Kemp agreed a mandatory system could not work under a membership organisations such as the LGA.
Instead, he argued for a political solution to make councils step forward.
‘I think that is the role of political groups at the LGA,’ he said. ‘We all know which groups – either in control or in major opposition positions – we have concerns about.
‘What you actually need is more discipline within the party groups within the LGA.’
Mr Skinner pointed out that independent evaluation by Cardiff University in 2017 concluded that peer challenge was an effective tool for self-improvement.
He stated: ‘The fact that over 100 councils a year participate in a peer challenge and have done so for the last seven or eight years is testament to the fact that councils themselves recognise that it is an excellent improvement tool.’
One local government source warned that peer challenge can’t shoulder all the responsibility for council efficiency and it needs to be seen in the context of the Redmond review and the examination of audit, as well as the work of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (CIPFA) resilience index.
Nonetheless, critics of the current set up are likely to be hoping the LGA’s review strengthens the process, particularly as they feel some recalcitrant councils have been prepared to avoid challenge and muddy the waters of transparency when the cliff edge may be quietly crumbling under their feet.