Frequently asked questions

What is CAA?
What is CAA for?
What's new?
Who's running it?
What's the point?
How is CAA different from CPA?
How is CAA different from what the service inspectorates have been doing?
Does the Audit Commission also have its own non-CAA business?
Why change?
What do CAA assessments look like?
What are the 189 national indicators?
What do organisational assessments measure?
How do area assessments work?
What does a red flag mean?
What does a green flag indicate?
Will every area have red and green flags?
If organisations disagree with your assessments, what can they do about it?
How can CAA make public bodies more accountable and comparable when there are no longer star ratings to make this clear?
How is CAA reducing administration?
Explain 'risk-based' assessment
Is CAA really about saving money?
What's the government's interest in CAA?
Is CAA going to make a difference to local democracy?
What difference is CAA making to where I live?
How are you communicating information about CAA to the public?
How are you communicating to those who may not have internet access?
How is CAA being put into practice?
How have the public been involved so far?
What should public bodies be doing to prepare for CAA?
When is it being implemented?
Is CAA an assessment of the LSP itself?
Can we afford CAA, given the country is in recession?

1. What is CAA?

In a sentence, CAA examines how effectively local public services are performing, and how well they are working together, to meet the needs of the people they serve.

It's a joint assessment made by a group of independent watchdogs about the performance of local public services, and how likely they are to meet local priorities. Assessments will be made publicly available, in print and online, and provide an annual snapshot of quality of life in the area.

CAA looks at a number of things, including the strength of local economies and labour markets, affordable housing, children's well-being, crime and safety, support for individuals to improve their health, provision for people whose circumstances make them vulnerable, and the quality of the local environment.

2. What is CAA for?

CAA is a catalyst for improvement. It will give people information about how well services are delivered locally, and help them make decisions in their communities, in their own use of services, or perhaps where they live.

For those delivering public services it helps encourage improvement by shining a spotlight on those things which need to be improved, and shares practices that are achieving exceptional success.

For government, CAA provides reassurance that public money is being well spent, and assesses how well local services are improving.

3. What's new?

CAA is about how well places are doing, on the back of local services working together to tackle issues like the causes of ill health, community safety and environmental sustainability. No one organisation can be entirely responsible for these, and that means we need a joined-up means of assessing how well they're doing - CAA.

This means it is much more wide-ranging than comprehensive performance assessment (CPA), overseen by the Audit Commission since 2002. Through CAA all local service inspectorates will work together to judge how well public services are serving their communities and in particular, how likely they are to tackle major issues in the future. The focus will be on real world outcomes for local people, and not just on the internal workings of individual services.

4. Who's running it?

The inspectorates are:

Audit Commission
Care Quality Commission
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary
HM Inspectorate of Prisons
HM Inspectorate of Probation
The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted).

Together they hold local services collectively to account. In April 2009, the Care Quality Commission took over from the Commission for Social Care Inspection, Healthcare Commission and Mental Health Act Commission.

5. What's the point?

We want CAA to give citizens, service users and tax payers a clear story about the places they live in. Offering clear and impartial information helps them see if they are being well-served by their local public services, are receiving good value for money, and what the prospects for future improvements are.

Those working in public services it identifies barriers to improvement, and where others are doing better and why. It also offers independent evidence to central government on progress against national priorities. And by local inspectorates joining forces, we reduce the administrative impact of our inspection work, ensuring public services can concentrate resources on delivering local priorities.

6. How is CAA different from CPA?

CPA focused on the performance of your council and fire and rescue authority. CAA is about all local services where you live.

CPA was interested in how councils and fire and rescue authorities performed. CAA takes a much wider look across local public services, including PCTs, police and probation bodies. CAA also focuses on how well people are being served by their local public services working together, not just how individual bodies perform.

CAA is about areas as much as organisations, future rather than past performance, outcomes rather than ways of working, and local priorities as much as national targets. Its span is broader than CPA and what individual inspectorates had been assessing.

It is an assessment of those things that contribute to quality of life in an area, including the quality of healthcare, levels of affordable housing, crime and fear of crime, educational achievement, attracting investment or an area's carbon footprint. These issues are neither the preserve of any one public body, nor for the state alone. Issues assessed in each area reflect local priorities.

7. How is CAA different from what the service inspectorates have been doing?

CAA will reduce the administration on public services. It means that some inspections will cease while others will change and be incorporated into CAA.

Children's Services Joint Area Reviews now cease, and CPA, including the programme of corporate assessments of councils, is ending. But health and policing services continue to be assessed by their respective inspectorates; while Ofsted inspections (including early years' settings, schools, colleges, adult learning, children's homes, fostering and adoption services) and, from April 2009, CQC (for social care and residential care homes) will continue to check that they meet required standards.

8. Does the Audit Commission also have its own non-CAA business?

Yes. The Audit Commission will continue to do the following:

The Code of Audit Practice audit, including giving an opinion on the accounts
Publishing national reports and studies examining issues affecting local public services, as part of the Audit Commission Act 1998.

9. Why change?

CPA and other assessments have helped drive improvement in local government, and CAA builds on its success. Our assessment needed to change as councils and their partners work together to tackle the major issues in their areas, be it economic development, responding to the needs of older people, improving environmental sustainability, climate change, crime or inequality.

As CAA is ongoing, rather than a 'one-off' inspection, it will enable us to discuss problems with local services throughout the year, so that those responsible can tackle them immediately.

CAA will also make it easier for citizens to understand how well their public services are tackling local challenges, and the outcomes they achieve. We are reporting these assessments publicly.

Finally, CAA will also make sure that government can better understand how national, as well as local, priorities are being tackled.

10. What do CAA assessments look like?

CAA is made up of two main elements:

An assessment of an area, which is a joint inspectorate judgement about how well public services are tackling local priorities both now and in the future
An assessment of each individual public service in the area, including councils, fire and rescue bodies and PCTs, for example.

Feeding into both these assessments is an analysis of the performance of local public services against 189 'national indicators', as well as other sources of relevant information. By bringing together the assessment of place, and the organisation assessments, inspectorate staff will be able to give a judgement on the prospect of local public services tackling the key issues in the areas.

View an example area assessment.

11. What are the 189 national indicators?

This is the National Indicator Set which measures the performance of local public services against 189 'national indicators'. How organisations and the outcomes of their joint work measure up against these indicators will feed in to both the organisational and area assessments.

In addition to the national indicator set, we will also use the views of service users and residents, third sector organisations and local businesses. We also use available self-assessment and local performance management information including monitoring of local priorities; inspection, regulation and audit findings - including relevant evidence from other performance frameworks; and other intelligence, briefings or evidence from other agencies such as the government offices, strategic health authorities and regional development agencies.

We are adopting the Collect Once and Use Numerous Times (COUNT) principle, so where the same evidence is relevant for an area assessment and organisational assessments, it will only be collected once.

12. What do organisational assessments measure?

Organisational assessments will measure the performance of individual councils and fire and rescue authorities. Other public services, like PCTs and the police, are assessed by inspectors like the Healthcare Commission (soon to be replaced by the Care Quality Commission) and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, who will contribute their findings to CAA. At each public body the Audit Commission will assess their use of resources. Through this, the Commission will assess how effectively public bodies manage their finances, govern their business and manage their resources.

13. How do area assessments work?

The area assessment asks how well an area is performing against the questions below:

How well do local priorities express community needs and aspirations?
How well are the outcomes and improvements needed being delivered?
What are the prospects for future improvements?

Answers to the first two questions will help provide us with an answer to the third question, which is key to CAA and on which the area assessment will report. Issues identified through our area assessment will be 'flagged' - either where something new or different needs to be done to achieve the improvement, or where there is exceptional success that others can learn from.

14. What does a red flag mean?

We will report a red flag where there are significant concerns about outcomes and future prospects for outcomes, which are not being tackled adequately. A red flag means that inspectorates have jointly judged that something different or additional needs to happen to improve outcomes.

15.What does a green flag indicate?

Green flags represent exceptional performance or outstanding improvement which is resulting in proven delivery of better outcomes for local people that are sustainable and which we consider others could learn from. Good or very good practice is not sufficient. Nor is rapid improvement that we are not confident can be sustained. We will also use green flags to highlight innovative practice that has promising prospects of improving outcomes for local people that we consider others can learn from.

16. Will every area have red and green flags?

We will not be specifying a pre-determined number of flags, so it is quite possible that an assessment of a particular area might not lead to any red or green flags.

However, the assessment will provide a brief summary of what we have found in connection with all the important issues in an area. How much we say will depend on how important the issue is locally and what we find.

If current performance is poor but we have confidence in plans to improve it, we will make this clear. Where performance is good and improvements are on track, we will say this too.

17. If organisations disagree with your assessments, what can they do about it?

They can challenge our decision to report a red flag or their organisational assessment score. We are setting up a formal procedure for this.

18. How can CAA make public bodies more accountable and comparable when there are no longer star ratings to make this clear?

When we report in December 2009 we will be setting out for the public how effectively their local public services are tackling the issues facing their area. The use of green and red flags will improve accountability by giving indications of exceptional success or areas where further or different action is urgently needed. Individual organisations will still be scored, with councils and fire and rescue authorities given a rating of performs excellently, performs well, performs adequately or performs poorly.

19. How is CAA reducing administration?

The government's aim is to reduce the cost of regulation. CAA's joined-up approach is helping us achieve this, for example, by minimising duplication.

The inspectorates are making maximum use of the performance information collected by and for local public services themselves (including information on the satisfaction of local people with their community and the public services they experience). Across inspectorates we are sharing this information to keep information requests to a minimum.

Most inspections will also be based on risk, meaning we undertake an on-site inspection only where we have identified a problem or issue that is not being tackled, or the risk is such that urgent action is required. (See page 48 of the CAA framework). In some high risk areas, we are keeping regular inspections, including services for looked after children and safeguarding children. As far as possible, CAA is being done 'in the background' to keep any disruption to services to a minimum.

The work of the inspectorates is also being jointly planned and better coordinated. The CAA inspectorates are working closely together and with government departments.

20. Explain 'risk-based' assessment

We are shifting from inflexible, annual inspections of public services, to inspections based on evidence that services are getting worse, or where we have concerns that services will deteriorate. We are working hard at unpacking the different types of risk.

Risks to delivery, in particular of targets set out in the LAA, are covered. However, we need to look wider and provide a means of highlighting risks to the continuous improvement of services and risks relating to people in circumstances which make them vulnerable.

21. Is CAA really about saving money?

If services work more closely together they are likely to cut costs. With over £200 billion of public money spent on providing local public services each year, CAA is helping to identify where money is well spent. The resources available to tackle this broader agenda are under increasing pressure and, with government requiring 3 per cent efficiency savings each year, make the search for efficiency more critical than ever.

22. What's the government's interest in CAA?

Local authorities have agreed a single set of up to 35 targets, plus eight statutory education targets, which form part of the local area agreement (LAA) with government. The LAA includes both national priority targets for improvement, and purely local ones. The government is interested in how local services are performing against the national priorities for improvement, and CAA will assess how effectively public services are delivering against these; but CAA will also inform local services about how well they are performing against their local priorities, too.

23. Is CAA going to make a difference to local democracy?

We believe so. CAA is going to give local people more information and independent assessment on what their services actually accomplish, and how they compare with other areas: that enhances accountability.

The pressure for improvement provided by public reporting has been seen in previous assessments. CAA information will help people hold their elected representatives and public bodies to account, and make the most of their opportunities to influence local decisions. It also helps local bodies challenge themselves - including providing information that elected councillors can use to scrutinise performance.

24. What difference is CAA making to where I live?

Increasingly citizens expect direct access to information about local services. CAA provides independent information to strengthen the ability of people to challenge and influence how services are provided. In addition it will help councillors challenge public services in their area to improve by spotlighting where improvement is not on track. While the use of green flags, when we report, will help other public service providers identify the best organisations to speak to.

25. How are you communicating information about CAA to the public?

We are using a variety of ways to report our findings from CAA, and the web will be a major element. A prototype web reporting tool has been developed to demonstrate how the new website presents information about services, how areas compare and about prospects for improvement. In addition, we are looking to work with others to link our website with others that have helpful information about local services. As with CPA, we will be using regional and national newspapers and other media to highlight our reports.

26. How are you communicating to those who may not have internet access?

The web is not our only method of making information available. We are working with community groups and others to identify trusted and effective ways to deliver information to local people.

27. How is CAA being put into practice?

We have tested our proposals in ten different places across England, to identify the best way of working. We are making adjustments and putting arrangements in place to support and deliver CAA in light of what we have learned. Trials have been undertaken in Barking and Dagenham, Birmingham, Hampshire, Kirklees, North Tyneside, Nottinghamshire, Stockport, Thurrock, Torbay and Westminster

28. How have the public been involved so far?

We commissioned Ipsos Mori to run 'focus groups' to get citizen views and feedback as we developed the framework. We are particularly keen to talk to people whose circumstances make them vulnerable. In addition, we have consulted local public bodies, the third sector and a variety of groups to glean their views.

29.What should public bodies be doing to prepare for CAA?

Public bodies should continue to do what they are doing; working together to deliver better outcomes for the people they serve. They should be producing information for their own purposes not for the benefit of the inspectorates. Organisations will not have to prepare for CAA in the same way that they used to for Joint Area Reviews or Corporate Assessments. Honest self-assessment can play an important part of an effective performance management system for any organisation. Whilst the inspectorates will take self-assessments into account in carrying out CAA, the local strategic partnership (LSP) is not required to produce one.

30. When is it being implemented?

CAA started in April 2009 and the first reports are published in December 2009. The first year builds a baseline against which future progress can be tracked. Of course, we are not starting from scratch and existing assessments are an important source of information. For practical reasons, not everything needed to support CAA will be in place for the first year, so some aspects of the assessment will build up over time.

31.Is CAA an assessment of the LSP itself?

No, CAA is an assessment of how well public services are working together in order to achieve the outcomes they have agreed both nationally and locally. The key is outcomes, as an LSP can operate effectively but for a variety of reasons not deliver the outcomes required.

32.Can we afford CAA, given the country is in recession?

CAA is even more relevant because of the recession. Rightly, the spotlight will be on public services to prove the value for money of the services they provide and this will be scrutinised through the organisational assessment. The recession also means that public services should be working effectively together to meet the needs of service users and citizens, and the area assessment will judge how well this operates.

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