SSRG Newsletter - January 2002: New Local Government White Paper Strong Local Leadership - Quality Public Services

On December 11 2001 the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR) published a White Paper entitled Strong Local Leadership -Quality Public Services. The White Paper can be found at www.local-regions.dtlr.gov.uk/sll/index.htm

An excellent summary has been prepared by the Local government Association.

The White Paper White Paper is promoted as a radical change in the relationship between central and local government: Part I sets out proposals to reform council services and enhance local democracy and community leadership. Part II sets out the Government's response to last year's Green Paper on modernising the local government finance system. It provides the important technical detail on all government proposals for reforming local government finance.

The government aims to build on best value and local Public Service Agreements (PSAs) to put in place a national framework to help councils deliver better services for their communities including:

• clear priorities and exacting standards, agreed with local government;
• comprehensive performance assessments for all councils -for the first time, councils will be classified as high- performing, striving, coasting and poor- performing. This will be accomplished by drawing together performance indicator data, inspection and audit reports and using a corporate governance assessment of each council via the independent Audit Commission.
• clear and concise public information about councils' performance, including a 'scorecard' available to the public so they can see how well their council is performing;
• targeted support and inspection resources according to councils' strengths, weaknesses and needs;
• extra freedoms, over and above universal deregulation, for high-performing councils that can use them to make a real difference for their communities;
• local PSAs to deliver accelerated improvements in priority services supported by additional freedoms;
• a streamlined and reformed best value framework to help councils manage improvement across all services; and
• tough and early action to tackle failing councils or services.

All councils will be expected to address the extent to which greater diversity of service provision would improve performance.

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