To report progress against the action plan that was developed as the Authority’s response to the audit of its performance management arrangements in the autumn of 2006, and the associated communications action plan.

The Director of Corporate and Customer Services advised Cabinet that this report and those following on the Local Area Agreement, the Comprehensive Area Assessment and the Council’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment and Direction of Travel scores were all interrelated.

Cabinet was informed that in the last corporate assessment carried out by the Audit Commission in 2005, the Council’s performance management arrangements had been judged as an area of relative weakness.  Concentrated actions to strengthen the arrangements had been put in hand and, in a follow up audit in the autumn of 2006, the Commission had stated that steady progress was being made, although a good deal had yet to be fully embedded across the Council.  Cabinet had therefore agreed a further action plan to secure the necessary additional improvements.  Almost all of the objectives and actions in the further action plan had now been achieved.  The most important result was that, whereas in the Commission’s 2006 Direction of Travel assessment it had judged levels of service to have only been maintained, in the latest 2007 assessment the Commission had said that performance had improved in most priority areas.

Examples of where actions had yet to be completed were noted; these included the role individual Members of Scrutiny Committees might play as critical friends for particular functional areas as in the performance improvement cycle and a bi-monthly cascade of information from the Herefordshire Partnership.  

The Leader confirmed the importance of the Scrutiny function as a further line of challenge.  Cabinet agreed there should be more pre-policy scrutiny and that excellent work had been done by Scrutiny recently.

Cabinet also agreed that the future actions necessary to continue the strengthening of the performance management arrangements should be taken forward as an integral part of the preparations for the new system of Comprehensive Area Assessment.

RESOLVED

THAT:

(a)               the report be noted; and

(b)               it be agreed that the plan be updated in the context of the overall Corporate Area Assessment preparation programme, submitted to Cabinet in April 2008, and progress reported every six months.