Methodology

Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) is an important part of assessing and reporting on how well this money is spent, and making sure that local public bodies are accountable to the public for their service quality and impact. CAA will report in a clear and easy to understand way, helping local people to hold the commissioners and providers of their local services to account and, where needed, call for improvement. It will also give government an overall picture of how well councils and their partners are doing in delivering key national and local priorities.

CAA will have two main elements, which will inform each other:

an area assessment that looks at how well local public services are delivering better results for local people in local priorities, such as health, economic prospects and community safety, and how likely they are to improve in the future; and
organisational assessments of individual public bodies. For councils and fire and rescue services, these will combine use of resources and managing performance themes into a combined assessment of organisational effectiveness. For fire and rescue services, the managing performance theme will be tailored to reflect the specific performance and service delivery priorities within the sector, and will draw on the peer review of operational assessment of service delivery. For primary care trusts and police authorities, they will include use of resources assessments linked to the separate performance frameworks for the National Health Service and police authorities respectively.

This website also provides performance against each indicator in the National Indicator Set. This consists of 198 indicators reflecting issues of importance in your area. Where the analysis of performance and improvement on the National Indicator Set has been used to inform any judgements within CAA this will be reported as part of the area assessment and/or organisational assessment. For assessment and reporting purposes, we have also provided a tool which will enable tailored comparisons of performance to be made, for example by comparing statistical neighbours or those facing similar challenges, such as former mining areas.

Find out more about the current proposals for the CAA methodology (opens in a new window)