The Government’s agenda - delivery of evidence of good performance, is shifting.  At all levels in delivering sport, setting standards, monitoring delivery and scrutiny, meeting local and stakeholder interests are taking over from national targets.  Central Government controls will still be in place, but these will be focussed more towards monitoring how well Councils are responding to community needs and working with community partners, than on meeting national PIs.

This move away from essentially service based performance measures to locally based reporting of our performance is a real challenge.   The HM Treasury / ODPM document “Securing better outcomes; developing a new performance framework” draws on the experience of Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) to inform a new approach to delivering performance reporting at a local level. (New Localism – Citizen Engagement, Neighbourhood and Public Services: Evidence from Local Government ODPM 2005).  IT systems are now being developed that can be operated, accessed and managed by a range of partners and stakeholders.  This means that you may soon be reporting, not to your local council on your performance, but direct to the local community itself.

For sport, engaging partners as a means of improving the way we do things and the outcomes we achieve, as Opposed to just complying with the requirement to consult, is a real challenge.  Doing this takes a lot of staff time, and we may need to train people up to help them to do it effectively and to ensure that we manage these processes in a way that delivers real benefits to the whole community.

We now have experience of working with partners at different levels within our own organisations, through LSPs, Community consultation and special interest groups like local sports clubs.  Our structures and reporting systems, though, are still essentially based around our own models of managing performance, which are still mostly service based. The case study illustrates that there are local and national partnerships focussed on agendas to which sport could make a valuable contribution, such as “Every Child Matters”, as well as partnerships focussed on providing a single system for sport .

In many CPA inspections the issue around sharing performance management information within an authority which is often raised is, will we be able to share with our partner’s information that we have not yet learned to share with ourselves?

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