Performance management in practice

By the early 2000s, local authority leisure and open space services in England had entered a period in which performance was no longer judged informally or by budget compliance alone. The Labour government's Best Value regime, introduced through the Local Government Act 1999, placed a duty on councils to secure continuous improvement in the delivery of services, with inspection, audit and published indicators as the instruments of that improvement. Parks, play provision and open space found themselves measured, scored and compared in ways that were new to a service tradition long used to arguing its case through visibility and public affection rather than through data.

Performance management in this context meant two connected things: a national framework of indicators and audit, and a local apparatus of service plans, reviews and scoring tools that translated national expectations into operational practice. This article describes how that system worked in leisure and open space services, how indicators for children's play were developed, and how quality assessment and consultation were brought together into a management cycle.

Best Value and the national framework

Best Value required every council to review its services against the "four Cs": challenging why and how a service was provided, comparing performance with others, consulting users and residents, and testing whether competition could improve delivery. The regime was overseen by the Audit Commission, which published Best Value guidance and related material and, through its inspection arm, assessed whether reviews were genuine or paper exercises. Services were expected to publish performance against a set of national Best Value Performance Indicators, alongside locally chosen indicators that reflected local priorities.

For leisure and open space, this national framework was a mixed blessing. Some indicators gave the service a measurable foothold in corporate reporting; others were criticised as crude proxies for a service whose quality lay in maintenance, safety, accessibility and the experience of users rather than in throughput or cost alone. The response of many authorities and their advisers was to build complementary local frameworks: suites of indicators that together told a fuller story of the service, sensitive to the measures that regulators and customers actually cared about, robust enough to register real change, and documented so that the system survived the movement of key personnel. The cost of collecting and manipulating data had to be weighed, explicitly, against the value of the information generated.

Choosing indicators: a documented craft

The selection of indicators was itself a small discipline. Done well, it began from the objectives of the service as set out in its strategy, identified the critical measures of success, and then tested candidate indicators in practice. A useful illustration is the work commissioned by Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the mid-2000s to develop performance indicators for children's play provision. Consultants Ashley Godfrey Associates, engaged on that project, built indicators around identified critical measures of success and then piloted them in different authorities and with user groups before finalising the set. The intention was to give a clear picture of the effectiveness of local play provision, and in particular to assess the extent to which local authorities were providing children and young people with good, inclusive and accessible free local play spaces, services and facilities.

That piloting stage mattered. An indicator that could not be collected consistently, or that meant different things in different authorities, was worse than no indicator at all. Development work of this kind drew on parallel guidance: Ashley Godfrey sat on the advisory group for "Planning for Play", the Play England guidance on preparing play strategies, so that the indicators and the strategy framework stayed aligned. The same period saw work with Fields in Trust, the former NPFA, on national benchmarks for different types of play space, giving local authorities a reliable point of reference when setting their own locally determined provision standards. Readers interested in how these benchmarks are applied today can find more at the Fields in Trust benchmarks.

Quality scoring and the voice of the child

Alongside counts of sites and hectares, the 2000s saw the spread of quality assessment tools for play and open space. Ashley Godfrey Associates worked with and supported Haki Kapasi in the development of the Quality Assessment Tool for play, an instrument for scoring the quality of play provision in a structured and repeatable way. Quality scoring of this kind served two purposes within performance management: it provided a baseline against which improvement could be demonstrated, and it helped prioritise investment by identifying which sites were falling below standard.

Quality assessment was paired with consultation, which Best Value had made an obligation rather than a courtesy. For play, this raised the particular challenge of consulting children and young people, a group poorly served by standard postal surveys and formal meetings. Alongside work with Bristol City Council to develop a play questionnaire for completion by children, consultants undertook focused consultation exercises using toolkits that mixed quantitative methods, such as postal and online surveys, with focus groups and workshops designed to include the less articulate participants. Response rates of 35 per cent or more on a twelve-page postal survey were reported as achievable. The craft of this work is described further at community consultation, done properly.

Contract management and the audit trail

Best Value's competition test also accelerated the contracting out of grounds maintenance and leisure management, and with it the growth of contract management as a performance discipline. Where a contractor delivered the service, the indicators and quality scores became the specification: payment mechanisms, penalty regimes and improvement targets were anchored to measurable standards, and client-side officers needed the data skills to monitor compliance rather than simply to trust the contractor's returns. Auditors and inspectors looked for evidence that the council understood its own service, whether delivered in-house or externally.

The wider lesson of the decade was that performance management worked when the indicator system was designed as a system: a documented framework, balancing national requirements with local service realities, tested through piloting, and connected to both consultation data and independent quality scoring. How open space assessments fed into this machinery is traced at how a PPG17 open space assessment worked, and the broader continuity from that era to current practice is set out at from PPG17 to the NPPF.