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Malcolm Morley urges local government to learn the lessons of LAA to provide a CAA system which will value quality of life and wellbeing. There is a fundamental question that all public sector organisations need to ask, which is, What can we, acting individually and in partnership do to improve the quality of life for individuals and the wellbeing within the communities we serve? And this was the starting point for Harlow DC's approach to its transformation from Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) ‘poor' to ‘good' in three years. We were extremely keen to move from an internal focus, and a culture dominated by providing services, to an external focus and a culture dominated by community leadership, place-shaping and partnership working, to meet the needs of the people of Harlow. This approach was exemplified by the council's approach to the concept of the LAA when it was introduced. Harlow was the first district council in the country to develop, through the LSP (Harlow 2020), a district-based LAA. It was determined that the approach to the LAA should be community-centric – a case of focusing on what the public sector and its partners could do to meet the needs of individuals, and the aspirations of the communities in Harlow within the context of the sustainable community strategy for the town, rather than county-wide targets and priorities. Economically, socially and geographically, Essex is a diverse county. As an example, life expectancy for men varies by 18 years across the county. The nature and level of crime and educational attainment vary significantly. There are many rural communities but also new towns, with regeneration needs. And while some areas are typified by SMEs, others are dominated by major economic entities, such as GSK and Stansted Airport. There are extremes of wealth and deprivation. An LAA that did not recognise this diversity and which merely reflected county-wide targets and priorities would not meet the ‘local' requirement in LAA. The Harlow approach to LAA has been adopted for the second round of the LAA, and the new Essex LAA now contains chapters for each district council area, identifying locally-relevant priorities and targets. The next step is for the district councils to evolve this further to develop neighbourhood/community action plans to recognise the diversity within their areas, and to lead the achievement of real improvements in outcomes through a co-ordinated and locally-responsive approach to public sector investment and action. This is no different from unitary/metropolitan councils developing neighbourhood/community action plans for different parts of their areas. We are now faced with the demise of CPA and the development of CAA. And it is vital that the lessons learned from the LAA are used in CAA. The starting point for CAA is absolutely right. It's about individuals and communities. It is then about how public sector organisations and their partners, individually and in partnership, achieve outcomes for those individuals and communities. CAA should represent a move to a Community Value Assessment. The focus should be the value created for communities, and not just the economy and efficiency of public sector resource inputs. After all, isn't the aspiration for value to be defined by and created for communities? While use of resources assessments determine whether or not individual organisations are providing value for money – economy and efficiency – CAA should determine whether or not public sector organisations are creating value in terms of quality of life and wellbeing. District-based LAAs reflect the local priorities of the sustainable community1 strategy (SCS) and local choices of national indicators for communities. In many ways, they are the implementation plan for the SCS and national priorities within communities. The SCS and LAA should, therefore, provide the community context for CAA. Perhaps a vital question for CAA is, To what extent are public sector organisations, individually and in partnership, making an impact on the quality of life of individuals and the wellbeing within the communities which they serve through their implementation of the SCS and the LAA for those communities? The key to all of the above, irrespective of whether there is unitary local government or not, is that communities are local and value is created locally. The local in LAA needs to be at the forefront of CAA. District councils, as community leaders and place-shapers for their communities, need to play a key leadership role in CAA and LAAs. Malcolm Morley is chief executive of Harlow DC

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WHITEHALL

Learning the lessons of LAAs

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