Corporate assessment

The Audit Commission has awarded KCC the highest possible score of 4 out of 4 for its Corporate Assessment.

The council is assessed across five key themes:

• ambition
• prioritisation
• capacity
• performance management
• achievement

KCC received top scores of 4 out of 4 for ambition and prioritisation and 3 out of 4 for capacity, performance management and achievement.

Background

Our Corporate Assessment took place from 27 November 2007 to 9 May 2008.

Inspections on the Youth Service and the Joint Area Review of services for children and young people also took place at this time.

The Corporate Assessment is one element in the overall assessment of a council that leads to its Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) score and category. This Corporate Assessment will feed into KCC's 2009 CPA score.

The purpose of the Corporate Assessment is to assess how well the council engages with and leads its communities, delivers community priorities in partnership with others and ensures continuous improvement across the range of its activities.

Report highlights

Ambition

The council was regarded as being strongly ambitious for itself and raising the ambitions of its partners and for its work in influencing government thinking on Local Public Service Agreement (LPSAs) and Local Area Agreements (LAAs).

Kent's Community Strategy, the Vision for Kent, was recognised as being "an excellent, inspiring document", setting out clear challenging ambitions for KCC. The overarching Local Strategic Partnership (the Kent Partnership) are very well-matched to the strategic challenges facing the county.

KCC was thought to be a very effective voice for Kent, widely recognised and appreciated by local partners for its sub-regional, regional, national and European activity in promoting the interests of Kent.

KCC was praised for its high-focus on tackling deprivation through improving access to employment and to employment skills and for its work over the last five years in improving the life chances of less academic young people.

The council was found to be unusually outward-looking. Extensive European and international partnership projects and the adoption of commercial practices to customer service, such as the 24/7 Contact Centre, have all contributed to better outcomes for local people.

Prioritisation

KCC's prioritisation was found to be strong with a great focus on individual user needs and young people.

The council was praised for its ability to attract and generate money and its effectiveness at resourcing its priorities through efficiency savings, asset-realisation and by attracting high levels of external funding. KCC, along with its partners, demonstrated a strong record of delivery, with many examples of transforming priorities into action and impacting positively on people's quality of life. These included:

• the Kent Success apprenticeship scheme;
• Freedom bus passes for school pupils;
• targeted skills development for 4,000 14-16 year olds;
• an improvement in school attainment, attendance and participation post-16;
• a reduction in the number of young people not in education, employment and training;
• a sharp reduction in serious road accidents despite a rise in traffic;
• an increase in bus transport, which is against the national trend;
• excellent work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children;
• the creation of a Green Grid of joined-up countryside spaces within the Thames Gateway; and
• increased opportunities for exercise across Kent, especially in schools.

Capacity

The strength of KCC's organisation was rated as exceptional, with able and enthusiastic staff and high calibre councillors operating in an innovative and supportive environment.

The managerial leadership, driven by the Chief Executive, was described as successful in promoting a culture throughout the organisation of innovation, challenge and risk taking with a focus on the service user experience.

The council was praised for its excellently-produced written communications, which were refreshing to read in plain English and policy documents that managed to avoid being dry and bureaucratic.

Financial management and value for money were rated as excellent, KCC having received one of the best Use of Resources assessments nationally. The council was recognised as being "for some time…expert at augmenting its financial capacity through astute asset and service-management" and "extremely successful at attracting funding and making the best use of the money it attracts".

Procurement was regarded as being effective, with Kent recognised and used as an example of national good practice and host of the South East Centre of Excellence.

KCC has taken steps to improve the diversity of its workforce, with programmes to attract young workers and a greater number of women in senior positions. It is in the Stonewall's top 30 gay-friendly employers nationally and has the Two Ticks symbol as a good employer of disabled people.

Performance management

KCC's performance management systems were rated as clear, accessible, well co-ordinated and well linked to business planning, with effective performance monitoring arrangements at all levels.

The council was found to have used performance management to effectively drive improvement in services, such as an increase from 20% to 100% of on-target Youth Offending Service referral times to Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHs) and a reduction in the average number of days taken to repair streetlights.

KCC's annual appraisal process was regarded as being reliable and well-established across the organisation, with Cabinet Members also undergoing an appraisal by the Leader.

Achievement

Focus on the user experience was thought to be exceptional, with KCC and its partners at the forefront of experimental approaches to personalising services. These include:

• Gateways, retail-style shop-fronts for all local public sector services (county, district, NHS and voluntary organisations) providing better, more-integrated access for local people; and
• the council's work as a national leader on large-scale trialling of assistive technologies through the Whole System Demonstrator scheme, to help maintain people's independence. KCC is one of three areas in the country to pilot this and has recently been awarded £5.1m from the NHS to make assistive technologies (Telehealth and Telecare) available to 1,000 people in five Kent areas.

The council was thought to be effective in stimulating employment growth in Kent and engaging well with partners in the regeneration of north and east Kent. In particular, in targeting specific employment issues in vulnerable wards through its Supporting Independence Programme and developing young people's skills in areas where youth disaffection is high.

KCC has shown leadership on housing development in Kent and is an active partner in the housing growth areas of Ashford and Thames Gateway and the East Kent Empty Property Initiative, bringing empty homes back into use.

KCC's Local Transport Plan and delivery against it was assessed as excellent. There have been reductions in the number of people killed or seriously injured on the roads and in town centre congestion. Improvements have been made to public transport and the cycling network, with an impressive 19% rise in bus use and 53% increase in cycle trips across the county.

KCC was regarded as providing good leadership on community safety, with levels of overall crime and fear of crime reducing.The latter due to effective measures to reduce anti-social behaviour, such as the Community Warden Scheme and the HandyVan and HomeSafe schemes which have helped 15,000 elderly and vulnerable people feel safer at home.

KCC and its partners were found to have a good understanding of health inequalities and to be vigorous in promoting healthy lifestyles for all age groups. Examples include:

• the Green Grid in Thames Gateway;
• the active promotion of walking, cycling and riding routes under the Explore Kent banner;
• East Kent Health Walks for people diagnosed as needing physical activity;
• Activmobs for people to organise their own group physical activity;
• promotion of healthy eating and exercise to staff and free health checks;
• a variety of Big Lottery-funded projects for out of school hours activities which has contributed a marked increase in the number of pupils taking part in high-quality exercise for two hours a week; and
• the Healthy Schools initiative, an exceptionally successful project promoting healthy eating in schools, has 90% of Kent schools involved and 100% of schools in Thanet, where life expectancy is currently lowest.

Adult social care services were rated good, having recently been judged three-star by the Commission for Social Care Inspection. KCC's proposals to develop a more responsive market place that makes real choice and personalised care possible are notable. Its guidelines on working with older people from black and minority ethnic groups (BME groups), Culturally Competent Care, have been recognised by the Department of Health as a good practice exemplar.

This factsheet is also available in Adobe PDF format along with the full Audit Commission report.