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Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:17:00 GMT

Accountability covers a multitude of sins and is a convenient phrase that is rarely held to account itself

David Edmonds, the chair of a new quango, the Legal Services Board refers simultaneously to his accountability and his independence, as people in his position tend to. By the former he meant, he said, his answerability to parliament and by the latter his capacity for making judgments different from those he would have made if the board were an integral part of the Ministry of Justice and he a civil servant.

That's workable, but it leaves accountability as a tricky, slippery notion. It's much bandied about but rarely unpacked.

Take the phrase just used, defining it as "answerability to parliament". Chairs of non-departmental public bodies don't "answer" to MPs; they may be required to publish reports ostensibly directed at MPs, but MPs don't employ them or sack them and often give signs of never having read the reports. And note that it's members of the House of Commons we're talking about here, not peers, so "parliament" is a bit of misnomer.

Accountability covers a multitude of relationships between holders of power and others. Some definitions emphasise voice - power holders are required to show and tell what they have been doing.

Ejectability

Others underline ejectability, through elections, say. Elections are highly imperfect as means of evaluating the performance of incumbents. Boris Johnson said to Ken Livingstone on the night the London mayoral results were declared: "you have the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if they have a funny way of showing it".

The contrast here is between the rough and tumble nature of electoral accountability, where party label counts for much more than individual worth, and the precision aimed at by systems of administrative accountability, for example in the form of quantitative targets.

Departmental accounting officers "account" to the public accounts committee; which usually means they turn up from time to time to be shouted at and abused by MPs. Chief constables are accountable, it's said, because they have to make reports to police authorities and because HM Inspectorate of Constabulary can come calling.

But chief constables are also said to be operationally autonomous - they don't answer to the Home Office on their decisions to deploy offers to the scene of a crime, say.

Perhaps imprecision and wide ambiguity in defining this word are virtues. In any set-up where power is asymmetrical, some people will have questions about the conduct of others and accountability describes the scene of the ensuing conflict.

It doesn't resolve it - there is no final state of accountability - nor does it specify one method of accounting over another. Chartered accountants perform accountability, for example by requiring private companies to set out their flows of money in consistent forms so that one period of time can be compared to another. But that points to a little discussed dimension of accountability - hard work.

Budgetary analysis

Making sense of a company balance sheet or the budget of a local authority isn't easy. There's a cognitive aspect to accountability which gets overlooked. A health trust or a charity may publish a fulsome annual report, but who reads it? Accountability is sometimes presented as a one-way flow, of information or numbers or answers. But it has to be bidirectional. Those to whom accountability is being offered have to work at it.

Partners on crime and disorder

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:04:00 GMT

People should be involved in tackling their own community's problems as a rejoinder to centrally driven management, writes Sharon Squires, in an award-winning essay

I started in probation, training in the 1980s and working in various parts of the country. As a probation officer I had a "patch".

This meant I supervised all the offenders who lived in that area. I got to know not just the individuals, but also families, communities, and the local issues. We were fairly autonomous professionals and chose from a range of interventions to address offending.

Then managerialism took over the Home Office. Probation staff supervised individuals and became disconnected from families and communities. Targets were set by central government, which dictated the activity of the probation officer, limiting their choices in relation to different offenders.

I then moved to set up the youth offending service. I was attracted to that because it offered holistic approaches to youth crime. However, yet again there is strong centralised control over local agendas, with limited room to analyse local factors and build local solutions.

I was introduced to local government, the tension between locally elected members and local government officers, and the disconnect between centralised performance reporting systems and ward politics.

My role has expanded and developed, and I continue to operate in the grey area of partnerships. My relationships with regional and central government remains however a key and time consuming factor in my working life.

This experience has left me convinced about three issues. The first is that you really cannot lead, develop and manage public services from London.

To call local senior officers "local delivery agents" and to ignore their expertise, understanding of their communities and professional knowledge is a huge waste and at times insulting.

Building layers of performance targets above them saps energy and pulls public services in the wrong direction with too little room for local responsiveness. Public services have become too distant from local communities; micro-management has deskilled local leaders and innovation has been lost.

The second area of learning is that although it's hard, multi-agency partnership on complex issues is the right solution. How we improve health, reduce crime, ensure economic growth, improve the environment and so on . needs joined up visions and collaborative planning at the local level.

Thirdly, whatever its limitations, local government, with its anchor to communities through ward councillors, is a m uch better form of public service.

That has been recognised: centralised managerialism has not worked but the success on this policy shift rests on the ability of local politicians and local public sector leaders to deliver.

Public: Criminal justice + Features | Public

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Partners on crime and disorder