Best Value 2 pathfinder audit: East Ayrshire Council – podcast transcript

Fiona: My name is Fiona Deans and I’m joined by the Deputy Chair of the Accounts Commission, Douglas Sinclair and today we’re going to be talking about the Best Value 2 pathfinder report on East Ayrshire Council.

Douglas, if you can start off by telling me, what are the overall messages?

Douglas:  Overall message is that this is a council that is performing well.  Levels of public satisfaction with some services like libraries and primary schools have risen.  It’s a council that’s good at partnership working.  The council and its partners, for example the health board and the police, know what residents need and are making good clear plans based on those needs.  Having said that there is still improvement, as you’d expect because improvement is a continuous journey, needed in some important areas like social services and planning, but the council is aware of that.  It’s also true to say that public satisfaction with a range of services which are important for the public like road repairs, street cleansing and refuse collection are not as good as they should be in terms of public satisfaction but the council is aware of the need to improve and has plans in place so to do.

Another positive is the fact that the chief executive and the senior management team provide very good management leadership to the council but what the Commission has said is that that leadership needs to be matched by stronger leadership on the political side.  It’s important that elected members set priorities and scrutinise the performance of officers and hold them to account.

Fiona:  Can you give a little bit more detail about some of the areas where the council is doing particularly well.  You mentioned some of the services.  Can you tell me a little bit more about them?

Douglas: The Residents’ Survey shows levels of satisfaction in services such as libraries and primary schools have risen.  It’s also true to say, and it’s important because the council, like all councils is the custodian of your money, our money, public money, it does manage its resources well and it continues to develop its approach to making the best use of its three most important resources, that’s its money, its property and its people.

Fiona: There are a couple of new judgements in the report that we haven’t seen before, this is something new to the Best Value 2 process. Can you tell me more about the two judgements that have been made about East Ayrshire Council?

Douglas:  The judgements you’re referring to are firstly the direction and pace of travel of a council; how quickly is it actually improving?  And secondly, we want to try and establish its prospects for further improvement; that’s to say how likely is the council to make further improvements in its services and in the way it uses public money?  We assessed East Ayrshire as improving well and as well placed to deliver future improvement so these are positive assessments of the council’s performance.  

Fiona: You talked about being well placed to deliver future improvement.  Can you tell me a little bit about what that judgement is based on?

Douglas: Perhaps above all because the council has pretty sharp self awareness of itself and where it needs to improve and I think any organisation, if it has desire to improve needs to have that understanding of where it needs to improve in the first place and we judged East Ayrshire as being a very self aware council.  When they identify areas for improvement they quickly develop an action plan to address the issue.

Fiona: So what’s going to happen now?

Douglas:  The council will consider its report and what action it plans to take to address the issue highlighted.  Some of these will already be included in its improvement plan. The local audit and inspection teams, that’s to say, the audit team that works on behalf of Audit Scotland and the inspections teams like the schools inspectorate, the social work inspectorate, will continue to monitor the progress of recommendations.  Also it’s fair to say, the issues identified in our report will feed into what we call an Assurance and Improvement Plan for the scrutiny of East Ayrshire.  That’s a plan that’s put together for each council after a shared risk assessment – that’s when Audit Scotland sits down with all the other inspectorates and come to a view as to what are the big issues, the potential risks in any council and that will tell the council what audit and inspection it can expect over the next three years.  What we’re trying to do is to make inspection more proportionate, to relate the volume of inspection to the degree of risk that a council has. A better performing council will have less risk and hence less inspection.