LG Group launches toolkit to improve accountability and service delivery

The Local Government Group has launched a light touch system of self regulation to help councils improve local accountability and “revolutionise the way they evaluate and improve services”.

The group said its “seven-point offer” was intended to help authorities capitalise on the coalition's reduction in central government inspections. The previous regime, it added, had been “time consuming, costly and overly prescriptive.”

The tools in Taking the Lead: self regulation and improvement in local government are designed to help councils explore how effectively they are delivering services. They include a so-called “Peer Challenge”, a free of charge service where a group of experts – drawn from local authority leaders, chief executives and directors of finance, along with people from a range of organisations including the third sector and business communities – review the council’s delivery of services and make recommendations.

Cllr David Parsons, chairman of the LG Group’s improvement board, said: “Unlike the regime of centrally imposed targets, plans and inspections we have successfully campaigned to reduce, our offer does not tell councils what services they should deliver or how it should be done. Instead, it is designed to help councils improve local accountability in ways which are most appropriate to them.

“Councils are accountable to their local residents, not central government departments. Ultimately they will be judged by how effectively they deliver services, rather than whether the right boxes have been ticked on a Whitehall bureaucrat’s template form."

More information about the offer is available here.

The LG Group also confirmed that under the new system financial auditing and safeguarding for vulnerable children and adults would continue to be nationally led.