PERFORMANCE league tables for local councils based on external inspections are to be scrapped, David Miliband will announce today.
The disclosure, which represents the second U-turn in local government in six months, follows growing frustration about inspection and red tape within town halls.
Mr Miliband, the Local Government and Communities Minister, will tell town hall leaders that the system will be replaced by a scheme that will include public and self assessments.
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“We need to start by asking where citizens can exercise quality control,” Mr Miliband will say at the annual conference of the New Local Government Network.
In 2002 the Government asked the Audit Commission to set up comprehensive performance assessments (CPAs) to improve local council performance by comparing councils. In the past they were subject to a series of annual inspections by national bodies and the Audit Commission which sent down teams of inspectors to look at corporate management, leadership and efficiency.
The authorities were then rated as excellent, good, fair, weak and poor against hundreds of national targets.
Last year the commission had to toughen its performance criteria — introducing star ratings instead — because too many councils were moving into the two top bands. Michael Howard pledged that the Tories would scrap CPAs and Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, the Tory chairman of the Local Government Association, has been campaigning for their abolition.
Sir Sandy argued that the inspections took time and money and often duplicated local audit. “CPA has reached its sell-by date because it has become too bureaucratic and too focused on Whitehall targets rather than on customers and residents,” he said yesterday. He said that councils had become bogged down, measuring performance against 750 different targets.
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Last month James Strachan, the chairman of the Audit Commission, resigned following a row with the LGA over the latest comprehensive performance assessments.
Although 70 per cent of councils were improving, Mr Strachan also pointed out that nearly half of all councils only provided minimal levels of value for money or below — which was seized on by the media.
Last year, in another U turn, Mr Miliband was forced to announce that the Government would not go ahead with revaluating properties in 2007 to make council tax fairer. Tony Blair decided to postpone any change till after the next election and has asked Sir Michael Lyons to delay his report into local government finance till the end of this year.