The Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA)  is on its way.

And while April 2009 seems a long way off in a world where we face the challenge of negotiating and signing off 150 LAAs by June, the two are linked by more than just a similar sounding acronym.

The CAA consultation, launched by the Audit Commission and other inspectorates last week, signals further progress down the devolutionary road towards improving the quality of life in local communities and delivering better public services.

Local Area Agreements (LAAs) are the vehicle to get there – allowing councils and their partners to focus on what matters most to local people, and improve public services. The driver, of course, is the local citizen.

This is because we all know that putting citizens in the driving seat of local public services is the key to improvement. Services must be shaped around citizens and the communities which use them.

This means consulting and involving them in running services, and ensuring they are better informed about the quality of services in their area and empowered to call local agencies to account, if services fail to meet their needs.

And that's where CAA comes in, providing an independent assessment of the prospects for local areas and the quality of life for people living there. It will do this by assessing the likelihood of the local partnership achieving its priorities, by assessing performance against a set of 198 national indicators which signal progress towards achieving national priorities, and assessing how well organisations are delivering value for money.

If this rich collection of information is gathered and presented in the right way, it will be of tremendous use. Not only will it help to empower and engage citizens, it will provide assurance to the Government that the strong progress on local government performance continues, and it will provide valuable information to councils and their partners to improve public services.

Of course, what the ‘right way' might be is out for consultation and will be different for different people.

We all would agree that if we are going to successfully communicate ‘prospects for an area' in a way that empowers and engages citizens, it needs to be in simple, accessible language.

Some would argue that the current language of ‘good', ‘excellent' or ‘star ratings' is simple, but how many people know what their council's CPA score actually is? There also is a danger that simple becomes simplistic.

How can a single score which assesses the prospects for communities in important and diverse areas such as housing, crime, child poverty and health, and the contribution of the different partners in those areas, be they the PCT, police or district council in a two-tier area add up to anything meaningful? Even if we could come up with a score that would make sense to the public, would they really understand ‘who' the score related to?

Of course, it is not just citizens who use the information. External assessment is an important tool for councils in driving performance, and CPA has undoubtedly played an important role in moving us to the position where just five upper-tier authorities are rated one-star – with no zero-star authorities – and there are four times as many good or excellent district councils as ‘poor' or ‘weak'.

But if, as a sector, we are to move from competence to excellence, we need an external assessment process which is a little more sophisticated, and one that increasingly relies on our own assessment of ourselves. It also needs to be more sophisticated as we enter a time where addressing the really ‘wicked' issues that face society require local public services to join up and deliver in different ways.

Our collective skills in this are continually developing, but an external assessment process which encourages partnership working will be of considerable use. Conversely, other performance frameworks that will sit alongside, such as that for police and health, must not pull partners in opposite directions.

Finally it needs to be sophisticated enough to recognise that we are in an era when expectations for public services continue to rise faster than available resources, and where UK lifestyle habits look to be incompatible with global sustainability.

Increasingly, citizens are having to adjust to a world of choices, trade-offs, rationing, and constraint, from access to care through to the disposal of waste. These decisions will necessarily and rightly be made by local political leaders. But more sophistication doesn't mean more burdensome. These trade-offs and choices should not be made more difficult by an inspection and assessment process which is unduly burdensome and wastes scarce resources, or one that judges performance on a ‘tick box' basis that does not drive the improvement and innovation necessary to deliver better outcomes.

This is undoubtely a significant challenge, but one that we must support the Audit Commission and other inspectorates in developing through the consulation process.

But, there is also a challenge to the sector and one that we must prepare for now. In designing LAA,s we must show local leadership to build, with partners, a strong shared vision for the area, and to take decisive action to resolve blockages and create new opportunities, particularly in empowering citizens and communities. We must seize the opportunity LAAs bring to work more effectively, and with a clearer focus on local priorities, in order to deliver better outcomes for citizens.

We also need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable day when CAA comes and we are asked the question, ‘How well does the partnership understand and assess the needs of its communities now and in the future?'

Many councils are doing this already and asking themselves who the different communities are and what do they need and want. This requires increasingly sophisticated customer segmentation and analysis.

It is important we are asking ourselves this question, not just because someone will ultimately be checking up on us but because if we don't know, how will we deliver services that genuinely meet citizens' needs?

Corin Thomson is programme director for improvement and performance at the LGA