Dirk Haubrich

The Perils and Pitfalls of Performance Measurement: The CPA Regime for Local Authorities in England

From 2002 comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) has been used by the Audit Commission to scrutinize service delivery in English local authorities across six service blocks: benefits; social care; environment; libraries and leisure; use of resources; education and housing. The authors examined CPA in terms of how vulnerable it is to categorization errors and gaming, whether it is consistent with other government policies and how it deals with uncontrollable factors. CPA failed all of these tests.

EVALUATING THE PERFORMANCE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Compared with most other industrialised nations, the UK government places greatest weight on performance assessments of local authorities as a tool to ensure high levels of public service standards and efficiency of public spending in areas such as education, social services, housing, culture, and benefits administration. Annual comprehensive performance assessments (CPA), published by the Audit Commission for England, are now an integral part of the central–local government nexus. By contrast, Wales and Scotland have embarked on different routes in the post-devolution era and have developed assessment frameworks that are much less prescriptive, less intrusive, and more reliant on self-assessment. Drawing on 20 semi-structured elite interviews with auditors, auditees, and other stakeholders in the three nations, this article evaluates the lessons learned from the respective assessment regimes. It also assesses critically the plans to replace the English CPA system from 2008 onwards with a regime that emulates Wales and Scotland-style self-assessments carried out by auditees themselves.

Assessing Public Service Performance in Local Authorities Through CPA - A Research Note on Deprivation

The UK Government places ever-greater weight on performance assessment of local public bodies through comprehensive performance assessments (CPA). However, the CPA assessment framework has been criticised for its disregard of local factors that are beyond the control of local authorities but that affect their performance. In this article, the assessment framework is described and three different studies are appraised that have investigated the link between deprivation, as one of these external constraints, and CPA performance. Suggestions are developed as to how the analysis can be improved, by extending the choice of dependent variables and explanatory variables so as to be able to use panel data as the investigative method.

Modern Politics in an Age of Global Terrorism: New Challenges for Domestic Public Policy

Much has been written about the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and their ramifications for international politics. This article contends that, nearly five years on, the type of terrorism which emerged that day has not only altered the way liberal democracies define and execute their foreign and defence policies, but that it has also affected their ability to attend to policy objectives domestically. Global terrorism, and the governmental policy responses to it, are not subjected to the same reciprocal balance checks that tend to limit the ferocity and lethality of domestic terrorist conflicts. Consequently, as policy-makers attempt to find responses appropriate to contain the new global threat, four values that democratic societies have come to uphold over the past two centuries are increasingly challenged: security, liberty, equality and efficiency have become fundamental principles that guide the formation of domestic public policy and constitute the criteria by which policy success is judged. Yet, our account of the political developments in the United Kingdom and the United States reveals that aspiring to those values is meeting unprecedented constraints.

To what extent does deprivation affect the performance of English local authorities

The UK Government has placed increasing emphasis on the use of performance assessment schemes with the aim of improving the delivery of public services. An example of such schemes is the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA). The CPA subjects English local authorities to annual audits and the collection of hundreds of performance indicators to arrive at final ratings that lead to corresponding rewards and sanctions. This article shows that the CPA does not provide a reliable measure of performance given that it does not consider the external constraints that authorities face in improving their performance. Using panel data analysis we find that deprivation affects authorities’ performance in all the core services they provide such as education, housing, libraries, environment and social care. Evidence that suggests sanctioning authorities that perform badly, without considering their local circumstances, risks the danger of perpetuating the delivery of poor services particularly in deprived areas. To avoid this ‘unintended consequence’, the article offers three options by which the CPA scheme could be improved. Points for practitioners With the aim of improving the delivery of public services, a wide range of performance metrics have been devised. In particular the UK uses the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) scheme, which audits and collects performance indicators on local governments to arrive at ratings used to reward and sanction. This article finds that sanctioning authorities that perform badly, without considering their local circumstances, risks perpetuating the delivery of poor services particularly in deprived areas. The article advances the understanding of the extent to which deprivation affects performance and provides practitioners with strategies to improve performance assessment schemes.

The Foreign v. the Domestic after September 11th: The Methodology of Political Analysis Revisited:

The implications of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 are far-reaching and have been discussed and analysed at great length. In this article, it is contended that the methodology of analysing the political, too, has been affected. The policies that liberal democracies have adopted over the past three years to contain the new threat of transnational terrorism call into question the methodological approaches that political researchers conventionally employ to analyse their subject matter. Rather than examining political processes at home separately from those occurring abroad, developments since September 11th demand that we dispense with those boundaries and develop an integrated approach.