UK local authorities (councils) are facing perhaps the most challenging financial environment in the last thirty years, having had to absorb at least 40% budget reductions - the largest cuts in public sector expenditure (Local Government Association, 2015), with more to come. In some individual cases councils’ budgets are being cut by over 60%, whilst services face unprecedented levels of demand and a drive to deliver increased public value in essential day-to-day services.
This could be seen as either hollowing out the state (Rhodes, 1997) or sensible paring back of national expenditure; at the same time, however, the regulatory performance assessments for councils have now been removed, and the main body for evaluating the quality of public service delivery, the Audit Commission, has been abolished to be replaced by ‘armchair auditors’ (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2011). Whilst predominantly a managerial audit tool (Broadbent, 2003), and flawed in many ways (Wilson, 2004), the organisational assessment regimes called comprehensive performance assessment and comprehensive area assessments (CPA / CAA) at least allowed national policy makers to have an overview of local government performance, as well as enabling some level of local accountability (Leach, 2010).
Contemporaneously, a body of scholarship has emerged regarding co-production, public service-dominant logics and service value in an environment of new public governance (e.g. Osborne, 2010, Radnor et al., 2014, Bovaird and Loeffler, 2012), which locates services users /customers at the heart of the service-driven process for effective public delivery, and which argues strongly for a refocusing of public service delivery concepts.
Whilst criticisms of regulatory processes are plentiful (Wilson, 2004), and critiques of performance management systems are hardly a new phenomenon (Neely, 2005), without these mechanisms it is not clear how the UK government intends to monitor local service delivery or how authorities themselves use performance information for sustainability in these circumstances (Walker, 2011). Local authorities are faced with a hostile financial environment, increased demographic demand levels, a policy vacuum from central government, and the need to adapt to technological and service-dominant logic imperatives in service delivery. Has the ‘golden thread’ (Micheli and Neely, 2010) finally unravelled, or perhaps more cynically, has it been painted over to avoid drawing attention to potential failure?
This exploratory research is part of a PhD project looking at the legacy of the 1997-2010 assessment regimes. Carried out in nine case study organizations with access to senior decision-makers, it qualitatively examines what performance management frameworks look like in a climate of austerity and uses empirical data to anchor propositions about new theoretical frameworks for the performance management of sustainable public services. How are authorities reacting to these challenges, and what role will their performance management frameworks play in meeting the demands facing local government now that central performance reform has all but vanished?
