The accountability of partnerships can create problems for local democracy, say George Jones and John Stewart.

 One will be held in July, on accountability, and we have been invited to contribute a paper. Here are our first thoughts. Reactions would be welcome. 

Partnerships are the Government's fashionable mechanism for delivering local public services. They come in various shapes – between local authorities and other public bodies, with the private sector and with the voluntary or independent sector.

Partnerships have proliferated. Researchers in 2002 found at least 5,500 local partnerships, spending £4.3bn a year, with 75,000 partnership board members. There must be far more today.

This explosion of partnerships raises fundamental issues about the health of local democracy. Since partnerships exercise public powers, use public resources and provide public services, they need to be accountable to those on whose behalf they act.  

Accountability is no abstract requirement. Democracy rests on the accountability of government to its citizens, which must be given expression in the institutions and processes of government. Accountability is the liability to give an account of what one has done, or not done, to another who has authority to assess the account and allocate praise or blame. It is the antithesis of autonomy, where accountability is to oneself. 

Local accountability is an essential component of local representative democracy. It is a means to control the exercise of governmental power. Through accountability, citizens are able to control the councillors they elect, and councillors are enabled to control the officials and contractors they employ.

The accountability arrangements for local strategic partnerships (LSPs) and local area agreements (LAAs) pose problems for local democracy. 

The Local Government Act 2000 gave local authorities the duty to prepare community strategies in consultation with partners and the community. They cover the improvement and development of the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the area. The Sustainable Communities Act, 2007, renamed community strategies ‘sustainable community strategies'.

Government guidance promoted LSPs as the main means of consulting about the strategy. LSPs brought together local authorities and other public bodies, as well as representatives of the private, independent and voluntary sectors. Their main work has been preparing the strategy and acting to achieve it.

Counties and single-tier authorities have been given, by the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act, 2007, the duty of preparing and submitting LAAs in consultation with partners involved in the achievement of the LAA and its targets. 

These agreements contain up to 35 targets, which are negotiated with central government through its regional offices, and central government can impose changes in the LAAs. The Audit Commission will replace Community Performance Assessments (CPAs) with Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAAs) which will cover the work of local authorities, including LSPs and LAAs. It will assess not only outcomes delivered by local authorities, but also those delivered in partnerships.

Problems for local democracy derive from the confusing pattern of accountability. LSPs can be regarded as accountable for the performance of the LAAs to their partners, but also to central government through its regional offices, and to the Audit Commission through the CAAs. There should be accountability to the local community and its citizens on whose behalf the LSP acts and whom the LAA affects.  

However, it is difficult to see how LSPs are accountable to the local community. There are no processes for ensuring this accountability, nor are most partners directly accountable to local people. 

The LSP is a body invisible to most citizens. If told that the LSP had decided something, most would be baffled.  
Local authorities are accountable to their local electorates, while most of their public partners are accountable to the separate departments of central government. For these public partners, meeting the requirements of central government departments is more important than meeting targets in the LAA of no direct interest to those departments, or the priorities of another body. Yet such help and co-operation are part of the purposes of partnerships.

The local authority faces special problems. The local authority, as the only directly elected member, is supposed to play the leading role in the LSP. It has responsibility for the LSP and the LAA. Only the local authority has the duty to prepare the LAA.  

The other public partners have only the uncertain duty to co-operate, take account of and have regard to LAA targets. The local authority has no direct powers to ensure the effective working of the LSP, or to secure that targets set within the LAA are met, when those targets do not lie within its direct responsibilities. 

Supporters of LSPs and LAAs might say that their intention is to give local authorities some leverage over other local bodies, which the local authorities can use for the benefit of the local community. But they cannot compel a recalcitrant partner, since they have no real leverage on the other bodies. 

The LAA and the CAA can turn the local authority's attention away from its local community to meeting the requirements of central government and the Audit Commission inspectorates, making the local authority more accountable to them than to its own electorate. Some may think all that is needed is transparency and public scrutiny. They are essential for answerability, but do not add up to democratic accountability.  

Some may think that since partnerships involve sharing responsibility then multiple accountabilities are appropriate. 

But if accountability is shared in arrangements of joint accountability then any partner can shuffle off his or her responsibility to others, so that no-one can ever be held to account. Shared accountability becomes, in practice, joint irresponsibility, where no-one is accountable. 

Is not the solution to the problems of accountability that the elected local authority in its community leadership role should be in the driving seat of the LSPs and LAAs, and that the partners should be obliged to follow its lead? 

George Jones is emeritus professor of government at the LSE and John Stewart is emeritus professor at INLOGOV