Hampshire County Council Corporate Assessment
Name of corporate assessment team leader: Anne Delaney
For more information please contact:
Comprehensive Performance Assessment Project Team
33 Greycoat Street
London
SW1P 2QFE-mail: cpa@audit-commission.gov.uk
Telephone: 020 7463 3485
© Audit Commission, 2002
Contents
Framework for corporate assessment
Summary and scoping of corporate assessment judgements
What is the Council trying to achieve?
How has the Council set about delivering its priorities?
What has the Council achieved/not achieved to date?
In the light of what the Council has learned to date, what does it plan to do next?
Summary of theme scores and strengths/weaknesses
Conduct of the corporate assessment
Summary and scoping of corporate assessment judgements
1. Hampshire County Council has a strong focus on achieving its objectives, high customer satisfaction, and, overall, some of the best services provided by a county council. It has strong political and executive leadership, is open to challenge and new ideas, and has high quality staff.
2. The Council can demonstrate very good performance across a wide range of areas, and performance is continuing to improve. Forty-three per cent of its Best Value performance indicators (BVPIs) for 2000/01 are in the top quartile, and 60 per cent show improvement over the previous year. It has improved its comparative position against other county councils in that period from eighth to first. There are pockets of poor performance, but the Council is taking action to address these. The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) has categorised Hampshire as a top performing authority. SSI (Social Services Inspectorate) places Hampshire as above average, but not amongst the top performers. SSI and OFSTED have both concluded that the Council has demonstrated that it is likely to improve.
3. The Council has a clear sense of its corporate priorities and ambitions. The current inconsistency of language used in expressing these ambitions across the whole range of its corporate and service strategies tends to weaken their impact, but the Council has recognised this, and is seeking to bring all plans into line with its revised corporate strategy. Considerable emphasis is placed on progressing corporate priorities within Cabinet and the Corporate Management Team, and there is continuous review of progress and of priorities. Resources are shifted to high priorities, and good budgetary control and delegation aids this process. Members and managers are willing to tackle difficult problems, and to take difficult decisions when necessary to progress corporate aims.
4. The Councils' priorities are based firmly on local needs. The Council has an impressive array of methods of communication and consultation with users and partners, and good intelligence about the views of its residents and other stakeholders. Plans are generally informed by extensive consultation. Consultation could, however, sometimes be more effective, and better use could be made of established consultation mechanisms.
5. Members are using the opportunity of a new political structure to build their capacity and knowledge, and officers and members are working well together to provide excellent strategic capacity for the Council. Members have yet, however, to realize the potential of scrutiny to explore evidence-based alternatives to existing policies and strategies.
6. The Council is self-aware, with a demonstrable capacity to learn. It welcomes challenge from external agencies, from the people it serves, from its internal review processes, and from its own staff. It has effective mechanisms for learning what works and what does not, and acts on what it has learned. The Council has shown its willingness to address both operational and management impediments to performance, and is willing to explore an innovative range of solutions to problems. There is a clear reliance on partnerships to deliver complex issues, and partnerships are generally working well. The Council provides strong leadership in many areas, including economic partnerships, transport, further education, and supporting people. Leadership is less evident in certain corporate crosscutting areas, such as community safety and equalities.
7. The Council has a strongly performance-driven culture. Both the political leadership and senior management have a clear commitment to improvement. Improvement is seen as the day job. The Council has a solid framework in place that specifies what is to be done, who is responsible for doing it, and how monitoring will ensure that it is kept on track. Performance management and monitoring is a growing strength in the organisation. It could be improved by a clearer focus on outputs and outcomes for users, by a more proactive use of performance indicators to effect improvement, and by the adoption of more robust and stretching targets, but the Council recognises this and is taking steps to address these issues.
8. Performance management of staff in particular is a growing strength, and staff are knowledgeable, involved, well trained, and have a good grasp of priorities. Recruitment and retention of staff is a problem common to the south east, but the Council has identified present and anticipated skills shortages, and has clear plans in place to address them.
9. Effective and well established building blocks are in place to ensure future improvement, and future plans can be seen in the context of a political consensus on priorities, stable management, and stable finances.