21 New government policies and legislation frequently involve partnership working. The major policy initiatives within the seven shared priorities for local government (Ref. 3) all depend for their success on effective joint working at a local level. There is a growing policy focus on area governance at regional, sub-regional and the neighbourhood level; this may involve local authorities and a variety of partners at each level.
22 The government has introduced a number of initiatives to improve the governance of partnerships locally. For example, the development of local area agreements (LAAs) should help to improve horizontal accountability, align budgetary and other processes and streamline decisions on service planning and delivery.
23 These initiatives promote greater integration in the way that public organisations plan, commission and increasingly deliver public services through partnerships. It is therefore timely for the Commission to revisit this important topic, and to draw on its experience and learning to identify good practice. This will be important in helping public bodies and policymakers to solve common problems and, in particular, to help them address two important questions that so far have proved surprisingly difficult to answer:
a) How do partnerships add value?
There are frequent claims that partnerships contribute to improving the quality of local public services and to residents' quality of life. However, there are few indicators of partnership performance to show whether this is the case and, if so, to what extent. There is little information to show whether the added value that partnerships produce outweighs their operating costs.
b) Who is in charge of partnerships?
Governance arrangements for partnerships are much less prescriptive than those for corporate bodies in the public sector. As a result, different governance arrangements have evolved for different forms of partnership; there is no consensus on the best way of governing partnerships.
24 This report excludes consideration of public private partnerships (PPP), procurement partnerships (strategic partnering through long-term contracts) and the private finance initiative (PFI). We intend to conduct a separate study on the specific issues arising from these collaborations for public bodies.