Surrey County Conservatives

The Corporate Assessment is part of the wider inspection regime that leads to the Council’s overall star rating. The purpose was to assess how well the Council engages with and leads its communities, delivers community priorities in partnership with others, and ensures continuous improvement across the range of Council activities.

The Council has secured an overall score of 3 out of a possible 4 – which means the inspectors consider we are performing well, consistently above minimum requirements. This is what we anticipated in our self-assessment and means that we have a good self-awareness of our strengths and areas for improvement.

Key Messages:

SCC is a good Council – winning praise in the Corporate Assessment for value for money, providing community leadership, its political management and excellent working relationships with partners.

The report identifies areas to improve which we are taking action on – including making the most of our councillors, developing long-term strategies, and speeding up our approach to equalities and diversity

The report says a number of positive things:

Ambition

· “The Council demonstrates good community leadership, including a participative style of leadership for the Surrey Strategic Partnership that promotes positive engagement”

· “The Council has worked constructively through the Surrey Strategic Partnership to deliver a clear long-term vision for the county which reflects a good understanding of the needs and aspirations of the community and the challenges that face the county”

Prioritisation

· “Priorities are clear and staff and most stakeholders understand their role in delivery”

· “The Council has identified significant savings to enable additional investment in priority services”

Capacity

· “Political and managerial leadership is strong” and “councillors and officers are clear about their roles and responsibilities”

· “The Council delivers good value for money. Service costs are generally low and overall performance is good or improving”.

· “The Council promotes good access to services and is increasingly responsive to the diverse needs of users”

It also identifies three areas for improvement:

· “the Council has yet to define long term, outcome based measures of what it wants to achieve for the area”. We are addressing this with our partners in the Surrey Strategic Partnership by reviewing the Community Strategy for Surrey.

· “the Council is not maximising the potential of all councillors and should adopt a more systematic approach to councillor development”. We are addressing this initially through the Member/Officer Task Group that was set up at the last County Council meeting on 17 June.

· “the Council is not acting quickly enough to improve its approach to equalities and diversity”. We acknowledged this point in our own self-assessment and are making determined progress towards level 3 assessment for equalities and diversity in March 2009.

I welcome the findings of this report, which reinforces the fact that in most areas, Surrey County Council is a strongly performing authority.

Not only that, but the areas highlighted for their strengths are those which are increasingly vital to effective service delivery – community leadership and transparent, accessible, high quality public services and first class partnership work – the combination of which ensures we are delivering good value for money to residents.

We will not ignore those areas highlighted for improvement, and work to tackle these issues is already underway. This is also reflected in the refreshed Improvement Programme that is coming to the Executive for approval tomorrow. To which programme I think we should add better Member support and development.

I therefore commend this inspection report, and reassure Members that we are committed to using the feedback to help us strive even further towards even better delivery of public services in Surrey.