Gateshead has a strong track record of sustaining and strengthening its performance under CPA. It maintained its position in the top two categories of CPA between 2002 and 2008.
The council's 2006 corporate assessment identified a range of strengths, including community leadership, notable partnership working arrangements and good outcomes linked to local priorities. The corporate assessment also highlighted the scope for improvement in a few key areas, including the need to strengthen the council's service planning and performance management frameworks.
Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council acknowledged the key corporate assessment findings, recognising that a more robust approach to service planning would help it improve service performance, and a more robust approach to performance management – including a stronger focus on outcomes – would help it target, monitor and report the impact it was making.
One significant change was a fundamental overhaul of the community strategy, undertaken in collaboration with partners following extensive consultation and scenario planning. The new strategy has a clearer and longer-term vision for Gateshead, covering the period to 2030. It sets out very challenging shared ambitions for the area – ambitions which the council has included in its service planning, target setting and performance management arrangements. This helped council staff understand how their contribution supported the bigger picture and provides a useful way to track progress against long-term ambitions.
The council is a believed strongly in external assessment and evaluation, using feedback positively to help it improve. The council had a strong culture of self-evaluation in addition to the feedback it received from regulators and inspectorates and had a track record of commissioning peer reviews to independently assess its performance. For example, an IDeA peer review in 2005, commissioned to support its preparations for the 2006 corporate assessment, helped the council to recognise an over-emphasis on improving processes rather than outcomes. In late 2008, the council commissioned a further peer review to assess area and neighbourhood work and community engagement which helped the council and its partners gear-up for CAA.
The council has also commissioned additional support from the Audit Commission, to help it strengthen its asset management arrangements and improve organisational efficiency.
Comprehensive benchmarking arrangements, both regionally with other Tyne and Wear councils and nationally with high-performing councils, which share similar characteristics, help the council to improve further and to share its own experiences about initiatives that worked particularly well.
The 2006 corporate assessment acknowledged the long history of partnership working in Gateshead. Since then the council and its partners strengthened their working arrangements even further to promote continuous improvement. They reduced the number of thematic partnerships in the local strategic partnership from nine to four, in line with the community strategy, and introduced a greater level of accountability for its delivery. This, together with the local area agreement which targets cross-cutting improvements, ensures that partner resources are focused more explicitly on priority areas.