The limits of performance assessments of public bodies: the case of deprivation as an environmental constraint on English local government Dr

Most industrialised countries have public sector current expenditure of 35 to 50 per cent of Gross Domestic Product and have come under increasing fiscal pressure to cut or control their spending levels. This has brought about the need for policy makers to be able to evaluate what the government gets for its money. To do so, many countries have developed elaborate oversight mechanisms involving a plethora of targets, metrics and indicators. These are applied by bodies beyond traditional legislatures and courts of accounts and include quasiindependent agencies, such as auditors, inspectorates, and watchdogs. These assessment regimes assume that the auditees are ultimately responsible for the performance on which they are measured, a rationale that might neglect the fact that some public organisations may face external conditions that constrain, and are not influenced easily by, their policy. The article scrutinises one such evaluation approach, the Comprehensive Performance Assessment of local government in England, for the significance of such factors. Using panel data techniques and data from the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 and the first three CPA rounds in 2002-04, the study finds inter alia that deprivation in education, crime and living environment had a significant negative effect on the overall CPA scores, while discretionary expenditure have a positive effect. However, the effects differ widely across the five types of authorities. The model also reveals that there is no statistically significant evidence to suggest that authorities controlled by a party perform better than those without, and that, although in simple bi-variate analysis Conservative councils have higher CPA scores than those controlled by other parties or with no overall control, these differences disappear in multivariate analysis. JEL