Comprehensive Performance Assessment 2004
Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) was introduced in 2002 as a way of supporting councils to deliver improvements in services to local people. CPA brought together existing information on service performance in councils with a corporate assessment of each council's ability to improve. This was used to reach an overall conclusion about whether a council was excellent, good, fair, weak, or poor.
The results
There has been an overall increase in the number of councils in the higher CPA categories. There are now a total of 41 councils in the excellent category, 60 in good, 33 in fair, 15 in weak and only one in poor. This means that two-thirds of councils are in the top two categories.
Fifty-two councils have gone up at least one category in 2004; this is twice as many councils as went up a category last year. Only two have a lower category. In addition, there have been improvements in many other councils that have not been sufficient to trigger a change in CPA category, but do represent improvements in services for the public.
Figure 1: Overall CPA results 2002 to 2004
Five councils have moved up at least one category for the second year in a row (Bury, Islington, Southwark, Torbay, Wakefield). Two councils have moved down a category from fair to weak, one after maintaining its position last year and one after moving down last year.
There has been most improvement in overall category among those councils previously categorised as poor or weak. All but one of those councils in the poor category last year have moved up one or more categories and two-thirds of those previously categorised as weak have improved sufficiently to move up to fair or good. This is consistent with the Commission's commitment to Strategic Regulation, which focuses our attention on those councils with a greater need to improve their performance.
There is a large group of 73 councils that has not changed category at all since 2002. While 21 of these achieved an excellent rating in 2002 (and therefore could not move up further) this still leaves around one-third of all councils whose improvement over the last two years has been insufficient to move them up a category. Of those councils that have not moved category over three years, 21 were excellent, 33 were good, 15 were fair, 3 were weak and 1 was poor. (A further six councils which went down a category in 2003 have come back up to their original category in 2004).
In most of the councils that have not moved category at all there has been a net improvement in service scores over the two years but nine councils have a net reduction in service scores over the last two years (although none have gone down by more than two points).
Figure 2: Changes in CPA category 2003 to 2004
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