In welcoming the NLGN study David Parsons says there are three key elements of a sector-led assessment regime

we have always said that inspection and assessment can play a useful role in safeguarding financial probity – providing reassurance around high-risk areas, such as adult and child safeguarding, and ensuring minimum standards at institutional level, for example, in care homes, and prisons.

But, its days as a stimulus for improvement have long gone. All our experience and analysis demonstrates that self-assessment and peer challenge are the most effective ways of stimulating sustained improvement.

I was also interested to see a number of proposals around the role of the Local Government Group. I certainly think there is a necessity for national improvement bodies in a sector-owned model, and, as we develop our thinking on this, it will be very helpful to hear what others think.

As the Government unravels the restrictive and burdensome top-down performance architecture of targets, inspection and government office monitoring, the key issue for us all will be, how do we identify and manage the risk of service failure. We think this is achieved most effectively by the public sector regulating and improving itself. We fleshed-out the detail of this, with councils, through our ‘freedom to lead’ work – and we have been particularly careful to avoid the temptation to replace one burdensome external system of regulation with a burdensome, sector-owned system.

Our streamlined approach involves just three key elements:

using transparency to support local accountability – more use should be made of the information that councils already collect for managing their performance. And this should be publicly available, enabling citizens to hold us to account.

At the same time, there is a strong demand among councils for comparative information on unit costs, productivity and outcomes, and we are developing proposals for a national, sector-owned, benchmarking tool to support councils in driving down costs and eliminating waste

local government self-improvement – the local government sector will collaborate to support councils to meet their challenges and implement better services through sharing knowledge, peer review and challenge, providing councillor and officer peer support and benchmarking against each other.

Our new National Productivity Programme is a key part of our offer to help councils reduce costs and improve productivity

identifying and supporting those at risk of underperformance – another key element of our proposed approach – is a commitment to working with councils facing performance challenges at an earlier stage, so that support can be provided and service failure avoided.

The Local Government Group and sector-owned improvement bodies will work with remaining inspectorates to develop agreed ‘early warning’ signals, and arrangements to share formal and informal intelligence at an early stage.

All of which should allow further reductions in inspection, assessment, and data returns – while retaining the bedrock of audit and regulatory inspections, for example, of schools and care homes.

Cllr David Parsons is chairman of the LGA improvement board, and leader of Leicestershire CC