LBWF gets peer reviewed…but are the results credible?

In 2024, LBWF volunteered itself for a Local Government Association (LGA) Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC), that is an audit by a team of ‘senior local government councillors and officers’ from outside the borough.

How did this work out?

It’s worth noting to start with that opinions about CPCs differ.

For the LGA, a CPC is ‘a highly valued improvement and assurance tool that is delivered by the sector for the sector’.

Several senior LBWF councillors clearly agree, with Clyde Loakes, Marie Pye, and Grace Williams, amongst others, having been involved in CPC teams.

However, elsewhere, there are qualms. 

The idea itself may not be a bad one, it is conceded, as outsiders sometimes see flaws and opportunities which insiders have neglected.

But whether one group of ‘senior local government councillors and officers’ will be completely frank about another, particularly when all concerned are linked through their membership of the LGA, and the results are made public, seems a stretch.

It is an unfortunate fact that, to some extent, the CPC audit of LBWF confirms such suspicions.

Before visiting Waltham Forest, the CPC team was given a LBWF position statement which ‘provided a clear steer…on the local context’; and its report then inexplicably ignored some more controversial aspects of the council’s activities, while at the same time veiling criticism in local authority jargon, such as this:

‘The peer team recommends leveraging leadership capacity strategically to strengthen its focus on place leadership while enhancing service delivery. This includes addressing the ‘plumbing’ in critical areas such as SEND and ASC demand, work on prevention, as well as reducing silo working within the organisation and with Partners’.

In that sense, the peer review report provides little of interest for the ordinary resident.

On the other hand, there is one detail that does deserve attention, because it appears to be so revealing about the whole exercise.

Amongst other things, the CPC team remarked:

‘Businesses and partners find the council good to work with and acknowledge the investment made by the council into the borough’.

I was particularly struck by this claim, because over the years I have been contacted by owners of businesses, big and small, with horror stories about the way that the Town Hall has treated them, their impression being that only a ‘magical circle’ was ever really attended to.

Accordingly, I recently wrote to the LGA, using the Freedom of Information Act, and asked which ‘Businesses and partners’ the CPC team was referring to.

The LGA replied:

‘On Day 3 of the Peer Challenge there was a focus group session with local business representatives via MS teams. The LGA does not have the names or other details of the six participants. 

The statement(s) would have been triangulated through similar comments from other people spoken to, and the team additionally visited some of the regeneration projects. However, we cannot provide notes of those meetings as we do not keep these beyond the signing off the report, as per LGA guidance’. 

The evasiveness about basic facts is striking, as is the use of ‘would have been’, a slippery construction that has become increasingly common in local authority speak over recent years.

From one angle the LGA response is amusing.

But amusing or not, it hardly inspires confidence, and to some extent casts a shadow over the CPC exercise as a whole.