Accountability, Efficiency, Improvement and Change in UK Local Public Services: The Role of Benchmarking and External Performance Assessment

The knowledge exchange will facilitate the development of a network of policy makers and practitioners who will work with social science researchers to analyse and respond to the challenges of performance assessment in public services.

A series of studies of performance assessment in public services over the last decade have identified the hitherto largely untapped potential for policy learning between countries (Nutley et al. 2011). Our knowledge exchange activities will aim to facilitate policy learning between the UK, Canada and Australia. It will use theoretical frameworks developed in the course of previous research - in particular, regime theory and the concept of theories of improvement which underpin assessment frameworks (Downe et al. 2010), the alternative co-operative versus competitive approaches (Fenna 2010), and the UK experience of 'voluntary' comparative benchmarking (Grace 2010) - to apply to current challenges including reductions in public expenditure and the issue of how to assess innovation and the capacity for continuous change and improvement.

The proposed programme will apply these concepts to assist policy makers and practitioners in analysing and addressing current challenges in the UK and internationally. It will offer five inter related sets of activities:

1. International events - we will convene three international conferences, one each in the UK, Canada and Australia. The conferences will bring together policy makers and practitioners from the UK as well as OECD-type federal countries and the EU to learn from each other. The events will:
- Raise awareness of the knowledge exchange at senior levels.
- Encourage policy transfer and debate between countries.
- Generate feedback into the wider programme of international learning and comparison.
- Help design the UK seminars.
- Help to identify and motivate key stakeholders to be involved in future events.
- Inform the policy briefing on best practice.

After each event the applicants will write a summary of the main emerging issues and lessons learnt which will be fed back both to individual participants and to their organisations, to help encourage knowledge exchange.

2. Seminars - we will use our excellent networks built from previous research, to work with a small group of policy makers/practitioners in each country of the UK to co-produce the design of the seminars and the participant list - three in England and one each in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each seminar will involve 15 to 20 participants including senior policy makers, public services practitioners and academics. The seminars will provide opportunities for facilitated analyses of existing approaches to performance assessment and the challenges currently facing policy makers and practitioners. As with the conferences, the applicants will write up a summary of the seminars for distribution to all participants.

3. Network - the conferences and seminars will create a network of policy makers, practitioners and researchers who will be invited to inform the design and co-produce subsequent research on the effectiveness of emerging performance assessment frameworks.

4. Policy Briefing - this will provide a review of international performance assessment written specifically for a policy and practitioner audience and distributed widely via the web, professional associations and other media. It will draw on existing research knowledge and will draw together lessons from the conferences and seminars to highlight best practice from across the world.

5. Dissemination exchange workshops - these will draw upon early versions of the policy briefing involving one of the research team delivering presentations at pre-existing events of professional, local government, and consumer bodies. We will deliver ten workshops across the four countries (five in England, two each in Scotland and Wales and one in Northern Ireland).

This project aims for societal and economic impact by helping to develop better ways of assessing and comparing local public service performance, helping policy makers and practitioners to know about and apply academic knowledge to that task, and helping a much wider range of organisations and people understand about the best practices for carrying out such assessment.

The high cost of failure of local public services, and the benefits which accrue to service users and to wider communities if they are successful, makes it critical that they can be assessed and compared by all stakeholders with confidence and reliability. This topic has real importance to economic and social life in the UK because it bears directly on the quality of life of individuals and communities, and also has a major relevance to the public expenditure and public services issues created by the economic and financial crisis. Consequently it is of major contemporary interest and concern to practitioners and policy makers, and is in a state of flux as a result of the policies of the new Coalition Government and the new mandates granted in Wales and Scotland through the recent elections. Many of them are open to learning about and applying new and different methods and approaches - hence the strong and broad support from potential users for this proposal.

Thus we aim for impact in:
- Evidence based policy making and influencing public services
- Enhancing the effectiveness and sustainability of public services organisations, and helping to change organisational practices
- Enhancing the quality of life, health and well being, and social welfare, because local public services strive directly to support such outcomes

In terms of specifically who will benefit, and how, amongst non-academic users:

- UK policy makers (in the Department for Communities and Local Government, Treasury, Scottish and Welsh Governments and Northern Ireland Executive) will benefit in two ways. They will gain insights into: (a) how to develop effective performance assessment frameworks based on localist principles of voluntary and co-operative comparisons, and (b) which approaches work best in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of local public services

- Policy makers in Australia and Canada will learn from the experiences of the different parts of the UK about designing effective benchmarking and external performance assessment frameworks in devolved contexts.

- Senior practitioners responsible for assessing local public services in the National Audit Office, Audit Commission, Audit Scotland, the Wales Audit Office, and the Northern Ireland Audit Office will learn about which methods of assessments work best in different settings

- Senior local government managers will learn about how to implement effective performance assessment from the 'bottom up'.

- Service users and intermediate bodies who help them assess the performance of public services will benefit from more effective approaches to performance assessment which will result in more efficient and effective public services and clearer accountability for performance.

The specific legacy arrangements we propose will extend the engagement of beneficiaries and increase the likelihood of impact having lasting value. These are:

- Creation of a network of researchers, policy makers and practitioners to form a 'community of practice' connected to the mainstream activities of the Local Government Group and its sister associations, and those of the principal public audit bodies across the UK;
- Publication of the Policy Briefing and of further academic and professional publications (see 'Academic Beneficiaries'); and,
- Development of further research building on this project and engaging the proposed network in collaborative design of the key questions and hypotheses.