The London Efficiency Challenge is a peer-led tool that has been developed by Capital Ambition to help councils further drive up efficiencies and deliver further savings.
The programme aims to use the experience and knowledge of experts from councils and independent organisations to pinpoint potential efficiencies and identify leading practice.
Each authority that undergoes a challenge review is visited by a team of professionals. These teams are led by a senior London treasurer and bring together several senior local government professionals, such as finance directors. They are also supported by staff at London Councils and the Improvement and Development Agency.
To date, four London authorities have completed a pilot challenge – Richmond upon Thames, Havering, Barking and Dagenham and Camden – and the programme has just been rolled out, with a further ten authorities planning to undertake a challenge before the end of the current financial year.
Ultimately Capital Ambition would like to roll the process out to every London authority by the end of 2010/11.
Always room for improvement
Mark Maidment is the director of finance and corporate services at Richmond and has been involved with his own borough's challenge, and as part of the team that reviewed the borough of Havering.
Although Richmond already has a four star CPA rating, Mr Maidment believes there is always room for improvement.
"There's always scope to do more and having an external challenge is a positive thing for the organisation," he explains.
Mr Maidment is keen to emphasise that the process of a challenge review is not akin to a comprehensive inspection – rather the team works hand in hand with the authority in question to identify what is preventing the authority from becoming more efficient.
Identifying problem issues
"You have a very short period of time to be on site. Most of these organisations know what the issues are, there's just some reason that's stopping them progress," he says.
Unlike more 'top down' reviews, the London Efficiency Challenge is able to scrutinise and compare the costs of services across London authorities and then deliver information on the value for money and efficiency of individual expenditure to the authority under review.
The challenge team will meet with senior management for half a day to explore the issues identified during this process, and a subsequent full day visit will be made at a later date when the team hold workshops and interviews with other staff members.
"We're trying to tease out from staff what's going on out there, whether efficiency is really running through the veins of the organisation. We want to establish whether there's a correlation between what these staff are saying and what senior management are saying," explains Mr Maidment.
At the end of the review process, councils are given a written report summarising the team's findings and detailing actions that can be taken forward to release cash savings.
Authorities will also have the opportunity to apply for grant funding from London Councils to help initiate projects to achieve these savings.
The process is intended to be as much about highlighting areas of notable practice as it is about identifying weaknesses. Councils can then be signposted to other authorities that are doing well in a particular area – a collaborative process that it is hoped will help shape London-wide or sub-regional solutions.
More information can be found on the London Efficiency Challenge programme's webpage
