East Ayrshire Council: The audit of Best Value and Community Planning – podcast transcript

6 September 2006

Anne:  Hello, I’m Anne McCubbin and I’m here to talk to Ronnie Nicol about our Best Value audit report on East Ayrshire Council.  Hello Ronnie, so what’s this report about?
Ronnie:  Well, our Best Value audits look at how well a council is performing and the management arrangements that it has in place to make sure that it can drive continuous improvement.  We also look at community planning as well.

Anne:  How’s the council doing overall?
Ronnie:  Well, we think East Ayrshire Council’s doing well. It’s committed to Best Value and it’s committed to improving its performance.  It’s got effective leadership, good strategic vision and it can clearly take action to resolve any problems that it comes across.  It does particularly well in community planning and it’s also strong on looking after its finances, on managing risk and on being focussed on its customers.  

Anne: So which council services are performing well and which need to improve?
Ronnie:  Well, the conclusions of the report highlight community care, housing management, financial stewardship and education as doing particularly well.  There are some services that are weaker - housing repairs is mentioned as one of those.  

Anne: What does the council need to improve on? 
Ronnie:  Many of the things the council needs to improve are common across Scotland. They need better links between services and their budget planning, they need better information and control of service performance on the ground and they need to do more balanced public reporting of their performance. As well as that members need to be more challenging in terms of looking at the ways council services are delivered.

Anne:  How does this council compare with others that have had Best Value reports out already?
Ronnie:  Well, the Best Value audit process isn’t designed to compare councils but in relative terms East Ayrshire is among those councils that are working hard to genuinely develop and achieve Best Value.  It knows it still has more to do.  It has made significant progress on community planning where it’s well ahead on most councils.  It still has some way to go to achieve high standards of service delivery across all its functions although there are some positive comparisons to be made with other councils that have a similar context in terms of social and economic deprivation.  

Anne: What happens next?
Ronnie:  Overall, we don’t think that this is a council that gives rise to concern or where there’s any future risk.  We would expect it to respond positively to the challenge of future improvement.  At the moment the council’s producing a detailed improvement plan for the Accounts Commission that will tackle the areas that require further work and we’ll be monitoring the action that it’s taking against this plan through our local auditors who work with the council on an on-going basis.
 
Anne:  Thanks very much Ronnie.