The Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) was launched 12 months ago – and scrapped six months later. David Walker gives his view why the CAA was buried with hardly a murmur of dissent from the sector

Buried in June, the corpse of the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) was never allowed to sleep peacefully.

The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, a man who would pick a fight in an empty room, saw to that. Since then, barely a week has passed without him digging it up and giving it another pasting. Even announcing the burial of CAA’s progenitor, the Audit Commission, has not stopped him harping on about the burdens and enormity of the programme.

But 12 months after its first and only results were published on the website, CAA deserves a fairer requiem. We called Oneplace ‘a unique new resource for local people’. And so it was. It made a heroic effort to synthesise the judgments of six inspectorates, and disinterestedly flag up both grounds for concern and innovation within and between local service-providers.

On its headstone an objective engraver might note – this was from the external assessment commissioned from academics – ‘... general agreement that the overall approach was the right one’.

CAA was born in the era of ‘partnership’. It focused on how local public bodies work together. Its stablemate was Total Place – although it was typical of the repetitive nature of Labour-era initiatives that the two were kept apart. Total Place itself may not yet be quite dead, but Tory ministers such as health secretary, Andrew Lansley, and education secretary, Michael Gove, are doing their best to kill off any shred of council oversight over the health and schools budgets.

Still, if the intention of treating the local service economy as a unity was right, CAA failed the test of practice. Overambitious and under-resourced, CAA failed the Lancashire and Lewisham tests. How, in the former, could you assess such a jumble of unitaries, districts and county-wide bodies? How, in the latter, could you assess economic prospects in a borough where 80% of working-age residents travelled outside for employment?

At its death, few friends stepped forward to mourn. Ipsos MORI had quizzed chief executives and found barely 28% agreeing it had ‘created a constructive dialogue between the council and the inspectorates’.

Big failing. One of the six inspectorates, prisons, opted out altogether. The others struggled to come together, and their parent departments were lukewarm, at best. Ofsted was preoccupied with child protection, and its schools inspectors ignored wider assessments. The joint statement by the inspectorates in spring this year was euphemistic – ‘We accept we have more to do to demonstrate a fully joined-up approach’.

The inspectorates’ review concluded that area assessments showed that local partnerships were successfully addressing priorities in their areas, and most local public service organisations were performing better too.

The banality of such findings would have mattered less if CAA had had a clearer strategy. Instead, it tried to hit too many bases.

Was its information for public edification or for performance management on behalf of Whitehall – based on the infamous National Indicator Set?

The Audit Commission initially won its reputation in the 1980s, for organising audit and value-for-money studies. During the 1990s, it took on performance management of councils, and that has now proved its downfall. Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA), daughter of Best Value inspection, begat, in turn, CAA. CPA eventually won over councils’ backing because it produced a good news story, saying they were improving. If so, why repeat the exercise with CAA, with a new cast of inspectors? Ironically, CAA anticipated the ‘armchair auditors’ beloved of Mr Pickles, offering the public web-enabled evaluations of their areas.

The Oneplace website was an imaginative presentation of performance data, but neither the Government nor the Audit Commission would contemplate the marketing effort required to bring it to the public at large. We talked at one point, half seriously, of how much it would cost to put the URL on advertisements on the side of local buses.

If councils would not themselves propagate the messages – and why should they, if critical? – Oneplace would languish in cyberspace. In a pamphlet for NLGN earlier this year, Oliver Roth suggested that if CAA could have evolved into a trigger mechanism, giving the public a right to petition if, on the basis of the evidence, they felt services were not adequate. It could have a been true information resource.

But that may be to admit CAA’s ultimate failure was political. Bad news was believed because no-one wanted to advocate or defend it, even among the ranks of the Labour ministers who had ordained it. Oneplace could not help touch on the politics of deprivation, equality and resources. As that secret came out, Tory antagonism grew.

Assessing local quality of life had to consider not just the effectiveness of services or co-operation between the primary care trust, police and council, but economic conditions and income distribution.

Surrey and Kent and the richer London boroughs saw the threat CAA posed. No wonder they were ‘better’. They were better off.

Not addressing that truth left CAA with nothing sufficiently interesting to say.

Speaking it would guarantee CAA’s fate, if the Tories came to power. They did, and CAA died.

David Walker was formerly managing director, communications, at the Audit Commission