Bridging the accountability gap - Audit Commission

4
Public accountability in
partnerships
117 Local partnerships exist to provide better services and quality of life for local people.
Service users and the wider public have the same rights to hold partnerships to account
and to obtain redress as they do with individual service providers; they have the right to
expect partnerships to use public money to best effect.
118 Partners can achieve better accountability to the public in three ways. They can:
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be open and transparent in their decisions and activities, and communicate these to
the public effectively;
engage and involve service users in decision making and operational activities,
through active involvement in boards and through consultation; and
provide service users with the means for redress when things go wrong.
Openness and transparency
119 LSPs in NRF areas are required to engage the public through a community empowerment
network. Research suggests that other partnerships, including other LSPs, are not as
concerned about making their proceedings publicly available as individual organisations.
‘Conformance to criteria of public access is an ad-hoc phenomenon, and little
attention is paid to developing mechanisms that provide such access. Only half of
partnership board members (56 per cent) thought “there was considerable public
involvement in the work of the partnership board”.’ (Ref. 17)
120 Public bodies use the term partnership to portray multiple forms of collaboration,
including procurement contracts and voluntary collaboration. As a result of this the public
may not know what partnership means. However, the public use of the word partnership
probably has made people aware that public, private and voluntary organisations now
collaborate more than they did in the past.
Governing partnerships | Public accountability in partnerships 53