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- Public, Thursday 19 November 2009 12.30 GMT
Local authorities such as Westminster city council will be part of the Oneplace audit. Photograph: AFP
In three weeks' time, the day before the chancellor announces his much-anticipated pre-budget report, outlining public sector spending for the next three years, we will see the first results of a major change in local government scrutiny.
On 9 December local government watchdog the Audit Commission, along with five other inspectorates, will bring out the first results of its comprehensive area assessment (CAA) – now known catchily as Oneplace.
This is the system of assessing what is happening in local areas that replaces the watchdog's former comprehensive performance assessment, a regime under which local authorities were assessed on how they rated against performance objectives.
As elsewhere in government, the problem with this system was two-fold: councils were capable of meeting the targets, but missing the point – their internal workings could be four-star, but the services they were actually delivering might fall well short of excellence; and looking only at how councils run leaves out the wider picture of how public services are both perceived and delivered on the ground.
This year, all that has changed. Oneplace, which has its own new website, accessible from the inspectorates' own sites, but also from the Directgov central government website, assesses not just councils, but also police authorities, primary care trusts and fire and rescue services. The output is not a league table or star system, but a "narrative in plain English" of the priorities that areas have themselves set.
It is not just the output that has changed. Inspection is no longer a matter of the Audit Commission, Ofsted-like, descending onto a council for one or two weeks, grabbing information and going away to write a report.
"It's now a more mature dialogue," comments Steve Barnett, who leads the Audit Commission's CAA inspection process in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, and who has been with the commission for almost 10 years, so has seen a number of different inspection regimes. "It's far harder to put a gloss on things and it helps us get to the key issues."
Barnett says the process is iterative and begins at an early stage. "We have to share our views with the partnerships and what issues we think are significant," he says.
"We will then refine our views and look at all the information we have."
Some might wonder if there is a danger, through this process of dialogue and sharing, of inspectors getting too close to the bodies they inspect. But Barnett believes the process is robust enough to withstand inspectors being "leaned on".
He points out that many local partnerships will already have a clear idea of local problems and challenges. "Our list is very often the same as theirs and that means we are able to talk about those issues rather than finding they are being put to one side, as can happen in a two-week inspection process," he says.
Flagging up problems
When the new judgments are published on 152 areas of England covered by Local Area Agreements, there will have been a long process of this kind of to and fro. A flag system will be used – green for good, red for bad – to signal examples of particularly good or bad practice.
It's new for local areas and it's new for the Audit Commission and the other five inspectorates. But will it get closer to what the public perceive as good value for money local public services?
That is a harder question to answer. Without a single, standardised national measurement, whatever its faults, it will be harder to compare councils; but there's a different challenge here too. The Audit Commission identifies many of the common themes facing local authorities; they include health inequalities, housing, protecting vulnerable people, crime and anti-social behaviour, and so on.
The problem here may be one that comes to the surface from this week's results from the Public Services Trust 2020 on contributions and benefits into and out of our welfare system: in times of lean public spending, will more local citizens be asking, not whether their local authority is meeting the priorities it has set itself, but what it is doing, directly, for them?
Those are two very different questions; and answering them will be a major test of local politics.
