Local councillors must consult with local people, residents and staff about the services they provide. They should also monitor consumer satisfaction.
The councillors should be required to compare by benchmarking their own performance against that of other councillors and national performance indicators.
Also they must compete with other local councils in order to create a better environment for their residents. This helps keeping them active and always looking for more effective methods.
Best value is all about continuous improvement. It ensures that at the end of the three-year period, all councillors reach the same levels of performance. This guarantees better councillors for the coming period. It will also help that on a practical level, councils will develop innovative methods of service delivery and will be involved in more partnership arrangements with private, voluntary or other public sector organisations. The idea of best value is to feed information into an overall comprehensive performance assessment of the local council.
As part of the wider improvement agenda for the public there should be a quality public service unit. This will be designed to assess the quality of a council’s overall performance. The ultimate aim is to drive the improvement of services. Information gained from the process is intended to better target support for councils, provide better information for the public on the performance of their local council and make it easier to identify poor performances with a view to taking action to resolve problems.
The evidence about the council’s performance must be taken from a range of different sources and be gathered together to give an overall view of the council performance. After the assessment takes place, councils will be identified as being in one of five categories of performance: excellent, good, fair, weak or poor. Councils placed in excellent and good categories should benefit from additional freedom and flexibilities and will undergo less inspection in the future. Those in the other categories will be expected to progress up the performance spectrum and will receive targeted help to improve.
E-government is about using the power of technology to provide better public services. The aim is to have all public sector services available electronically. This also includes local governments. The strategy has four guiding principles: building services around citizens’ choices, making government and its services more accessible, social inclusion and using information better. With more and more services being delivered electronically, staff will need some basic computing skills and an understanding of electronic service delivery whether by Internet, e-mail or other electronic means. Many staff members already have the basic skills required, but where necessary, training should be provided.
Therefore, an employers’ organisation for local government should work on the development of such skills and will aid the implementation of e-government policies. The most important thing about e-government is to be committed to ensure equality and opportunity for all its employees and service users. This means that there is a level playing field for everyone – for staff with career progression and for the public with the treatment and customer service they receive. Furthermore, all councils should have a recruitment policy clearly stating that no person will be discriminated against by reason of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, culture or language, political beliefs and any other reason. Diversity is a huge benefit. Diversity means taking into account all differences. It values the different contributions different people can make. Local councils should recognise that the strength of an organisation lies in having a diverse work force.
Delivering quality public services is the ambition we all share. Rightly, the public has high expectations when it comes to the delivery of services. Public services must strive to meet these high expectations. We all should recognise this challenge and have the genuine desire to respond to it in dynamic and innovative ways. There is still much to do to achieve this. The government has to review the system; fund allocations, human resources, and the services the corporations are giving to the local councils. Services should be joined-up. The Local Councils are being shunted from pillar to post because different organisations and corporations are not committed enough to give best value for money.
People expect high quality service, but are worried about the cost and the implications for their taxes. Rightly, they expect councils to deliver services in the most efficient and effective way possible. They want to see value for money. Unfortunately the government and departments responsible for this, are doing very little!
Autor: Mario Fava
Quelle: Malta Today, 04.04.2005
