Brent Council's Diminishing Returns

As an addendum to the last post about the failure of Liberal Democrat leadership on Brent Council, it is worth looking at what PriceWaterhouseCoopers say about the poor quality of Council services in the Borough.

PWC were commissioned, at a cost of about £100K, to examine services across the Council. They say that 62% of Brent's performance indicators are below average and 38% in the bottom quartile. The proportion of Brent Council's own targets met has fallen from 52% in 2007/8 (the first year when the Lib Dem / Tory coalition could set their own budget to 46% in 2008/9. 57% of Local Area Agreement priorities are below average, with 39% in the lowest quartile. All this seems to indicate an organisation that has reversed its progress under Labour and gone into decline.

One mechanism that Councils should use to arrest such decline should be the scrutiny process. In particular the Performance and Finance Committee is supposed to track progress. Unfortunately, this is chaired by the egregious Cllr Anthony Dunn, who prefers to take it down eccentric by ways whilst ignoring major strategic issues.