By Lynn Watson, Maryrose Tarpey, Kate Alexander and Caroline Humphreys. Supporting People, the national initiative to assist people who need help to settle into suitable housing and develop daily living skills, aims to promote more flexible and inclusive services. Local authorities and their partners in probation and health services are now putting the theory into practice. The authors look at the ways in which new ground is being broken and the unforeseen problems that are starting to appear.

Sixteen pilot partnership e-government projects have been brought together by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to promote the sharing of best practice. The exhibition, which gives councils and their partners the opportunity to demonstrate the projects, supports the aim of getting all services on line by 2005. Central government departments and the private sector are involved in the partnerships.The projects should all be completed by March 2004, so that the results will be available in good time to help councils to reach the 2005 target. They will provide the key building blocks for the development of local e-government, supporting the work being done by councils themselves.

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Most of the smaller councils which are due to be brought into the comprehensive performance assessment regime later in the year are confident of success. Some 175 councils, about 60% of the newcomers to the regime, are confident that they will make the ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ category. Only about 40 councils are concerned that they may be categorised as ‘weak’ or ‘poor’. The remainder feel that they will achieve a ‘fair’ rating. These expectations paint a somewhat more optimistic picture than the actual results from the 2002 round which only included the 150 larger councils. The survey of expectations was carried out by Zurich Municipal.The survey was designed to find out about the attitudes of Chief Executives and Finance Directors to the use of risk management strategies. The findings were that for the councils that took part in the 2002 performance assessment, 61% of respondents said that risk management played a key part in their preparations. For the councils that were graded as ‘excellent’ the figure was 81%. Responses to the survey showed that risk management is set to play an important role in the CPA process and that an ‘excellent’ rating is more likely to be achieved where sound risk management and corporate governance arrangements are already in place.

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