Rebranding the CAA

Rebranding exercises are always suggestive – you only have to think about Windscale’s rebirth as Sellafield.  Along similar lines, the Audit Commission looks to be trying to reposition the Comprehensive Area Assessment as oneplace (oneplace is onelowercaseword for this purpose.)  For sure, oneplace certainly sounds less clunky than Comprehensive Area Assessment which reeks of clipboard [...]

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End of an era?

Today for the last time the Comprehensive Performance Assessment results are published.  I believe that since its introduction in 2002 the CPA has provided a positive source of external challenge and has contributed to improvement.  I think that its greatest impact was in its early years.  Despite regular tweaking and the development of the harder [...]

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Priorities not targets

In her article in a SOLACE pamphlet, Governing a world city, published earlier this month, Lucy de Groot writes about the potential that Local Area Agreements offer for Londoners.  In the piece, she quotes a comment made by Rob Whiteman, the chief executive at Barking and Dagenham, that councils need to focus on priorities, not [...]

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