Letter from Tessa Jowell to Chief Executives and Leaders

You may not know of a letter sent by Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State, to Leaders and Chief Executives of all local authorities reinforcing the importance of leisure and cultural services and highlighting much of the work that is going on at a policy level at present. If you haven’t yet been made aware of this within your authority it might be worth raising it with your Chief Executive, to help ensure that she or he is placing culture at the heart of their thinking. You may wish to note also the request from DCMS for the appropriate lead officer’s contact details to be provided.

IMPROVING LOCAL CULTURE AND LEISURE SERVICES

Each year local councils in England spend over £3 billion on culture and sport. Much of that expenditure is in partnership with my Department and its sponsored bodies. Up and down the country there are excellent examples of how we are working with local government to deliver our Shared Priorities, using culture and sport as a focus for improving the places where people live and work and creating sustainable communities. I am committed to doing everything I can to help local councils continue this good work and improve the way local needs are met.

Earlier this month, DCMS and the Local Government Association sent all local councillors a copy of the enclosed leaflet “Working Together: Local authorities and DCMS”. Our aim was to provide a simple signpost to the ways in which we can work together. There are links to a wealth of further information. I am now writing to you personally because I wanted to explain our plans for providing further support to local authorities to improve local services. I expect some aspects of these plans will be reflected in the Audit Commission’s forthcoming consultation on the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) for 2006.

The CPA for 2005 has shown that many local authorities are improving their delivery of cultural and leisure services while weaknesses exist elsewhere. We are working with the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and national cultural bodies to address this by:

• developing effective performance measures, to inform the CPA and any subsequent performance regime;

• providing tools and services that will challenge and support improvement;

• establishing a new system of structured dialogue between our sponsored bodies and local authorities focused on shared objectives and improvement.

Performance Measurement

The cultural assessment within the CPA is helping to identify excellent practice from which we can all learn but also provides a focus on what needs to improve. It is important that the CPA cultural assessment should be developed to reflect more fully than at present the broad range of cultural services that you deliver. Our proposals to the Audit Commission for additional performance measures to be included in CPA 2006 and 2007 are set out in the annex to this letter. In order that the various performance measures truly and consistently reflect performance in service delivery it is essential that local authorities are thorough in collecting and reporting these data and I am seeking your support in ensuring this.

Looking further ahead, my officials will continue to work with our sponsored bodies to develop performance measures that will capture the impact of culture on the wellbeing of communities to inform CPA or subsequent performance management frameworks as well as the outcomes framework for Local Area Agreements. To that end, piloting of further performance indicators for arts, museums, archives, historic environment and children’s play will continue.

Provision of performance tools and services

I wish to ensure that local cultural and leisure services are well placed to operate within, and anticipate any emerging performance framework that may succeed the existing CPA arrangements. To that end my officials are working with the Cultural Services Improvement Unit at IDeA, Sport England, Arts Council England, MLA, English Heritage and other national bodies to develop and offer a package of practical help and support for local authorities. This will include self assessment tools, mechanisms for external validation and peer review, Sport England’s network of local government secondments and improvement planning across the English regions.

Regional Commentaries

An important part of our approach to improvement in local cultural services, in the context of the developing local authority performance management framework, will be a new system of regional commentaries. This will involve Arts Council England, Sport England, MLA, DCMS’ representatives in the Government Offices for the Regions and, outside London, the Regional Cultural Consortiums. Regional commentaries will not be a scored item in CPA, although there may be scope for them to inform CPA corporate assessments or Joint Area Reviews of outcomes for children and young people. They will add value by providing a focus for structured dialogue between local authorities and our sponsored bodies to:

• help align national, regional and local objectives and connect culture and sport to Local Area Agreements;

• develop improved working relationships and mutual understanding between local authorities and our sponsored bodies; and

• provide a focus for addressing what needs to improve in local service delivery and how our sponsored bodies can support improvement.
  

We will be rolling these regional commentaries out in 2006/07 and we look forward to working with local government on this.

These measures, taken together, are designed to help local authorities to learn from best practice, improve the quality and responsiveness to users needs of local cultural services and support the cultural contribution to sustainable communities. In all of this we will continue to work in partnership with the LGA, IDeA, Audit Commission and our sponsored bodies. I hope that we may have your support as we take forward this challenging agenda.

I am copying this letter and its enclosure to your Council’s Chief Executive. It would be helpful if you could let my officials know who will be the lead contact on these matters for your council. Details should be sent to roger.stratton-smith@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

eNews issue 49