PART II

HAMPSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL PERFORMANCE RESULTS

The County Council underwent a Corporate Assessment in 2007 which was the largest, hardest and most comprehensive inspection its had since 2002 and received top marks from the Audit Commission of four out of four. Hampshire is only the second county council to achieve this top score. At the same time as the Corporate Assessment was being carried out, a Joint Area Review (JAR) was undertaken by Ofsted which focuses primarily on services for the most vulnerable children that are delivered by the local authority and its partners. The JAR took place in parallel with an Enhanced Inspection of the Youth Service and an inspection of the Wessex Youth Offending Team. The overall judgements in the JAR which feeds into the Corporate Assessment were "good" with some "outstanding" features equating to a rating of three out of four.

As part of the formal mechanism of reporting performance results, the Cabinet considered a report on 17 December 2007 and welcomed the achievement of the JAR inspection together with the Annual Performance Assessment (APA) of services for children and young people, also rated as "good" (three out of four). Like the JAR, the APA is carried out by Ofsted and although the JAR and APA mechanisms are connected, the APA is a more general but regular report covering all services for all children delivered by the local authority, universal and targeted.

The Cabinet also considered in detail the JAR Action Plan which the Children's Services Authority is responsible for producing and submitting to Ofsted. The Plan lays out, in one place, recommendations, important areas for development and major strengths identified in the JAR and the Enhanced Youth Service Inspection as well as development areas identified in the APA.

Also on 17 December 2007, the Cabinet considered a report confirming that the Commission for Social Care Improvement (CSCI) had awarded adult social care services in Hampshire the top rating of three stars for their performance during 2007. The award of three stars demonstrated a significant improvement on the two star rating received in 2006 and places Hampshire in the top six for performance out of the 19 authorities in the South East. In welcoming this achievement, the Cabinet were also pleased to note that CSCI has asked the County Council to share its expertise with other local authorities who are currently facing the issues that the County Council has already tackled. The Cabinet also resolved that in line with the Government's desire for local authorities to provide adult social care that is more personalised, a Commission be set up to hear individual's views on changing the way social services are delivered, receive evidence and opinions from local service users, carers and national experts and to influence the Government's Green Paper on the future of Adult Social Care.

The current performance assessment framework has four parts, namely the Corporate Assessment, Direction of Travel, Service assessments and Use of Resources. The children and young people and social care (adults) blocks have been reported above and the Use of Resources block has also scored three out of three. In regard to the remaining two service blocks that feed into the performance assessment framework, Environment have achieved a return to four out of four as has Recreation and Heritage for their cultural services.

All of the results detailed above follow on from Hampshire County Council becoming the first county council in England to be given the highest possible score by the Audit Commission for its work in supporting a wide range of vulnerable people with housing related services. The management of the Supporting People programme by the County Council and its partners was judged to be "excellent" with "excellent prospects for improvement", which recognises the effective partnership working across two tiers of local government at district and county level whilst fully involving service users.

Lastly, the Cabinet approved the County Council's response to consultation proposals submitted by the Audit Commission and other inspectorates for the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) and for a revised Use of Resources assessment. The CAA will be a replacement for the current Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA), the framework for measuring and comparing the performance of local government. The County Council is one of four authorities taking part in an Action Learning Pilot and as a top performing four star authority, this places the County Council in a good position to exert positive influence and leadership on the development of the CAA.