Bridging the accountability gap - Audit Commission

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Governing partnerships | Improving the governance of partnerships
partnership is unlikely to yield meaningful results unless individual partners bring personal
commitment to the venture. Partnerships should use governing documents sensibly, to
bring clarity to complex or ambiguous situations.
A stronger role for corporate governance
140 Where partnerships are not corporate entities, their separate governance arrangements
cannot mirror the detail found in corporate bodies. In the absence of formal governance
arrangements, responsibility for supporting the governance of partnerships falls to
partners’ own corporate governance mechanisms. Most public bodies have clear
structures and systems to support better corporate governance. However, the links
between these and the governance processes involved in partnerships are often missing
or unclear (Figure 13).
141 Public bodies need a scheme of delegation that makes clear who can take decisions on
their behalf, the extent of their authority and how decisions will be reported back. Public
bodies must scrutinise the decisions that partnerships take. There should be formal links
between an organisation’s scrutiny and internal audit functions and its key partnership
activities. For example, in local authorities, the health scrutiny function and the overview
scrutiny function provide good opportunities to investigate issues connected with their
power to promote well-being. Councils can use this wide power to create specific
partnership scrutiny panels. The Audit Commission’s view is: (Ref. 19)
‘If local authority scrutiny of health works well, it will provide a valuable forum for
review and debate, engage local people and generate realistic suggestions to
improve services. Done badly, it could duplicate effort, damage partnerships and
result in little more than political point scoring.’
142 Internal audit processes, and documents such as the Statement on Internal Control,
should cover the activities of important partnerships. Internal audit should consider the
risks attached to partnerships and report on the links between corporate and partnership
activities. The Statement on Internal Control does not require explicit reference to
partnerships or joint working. It does require the chief executive (and leader for local
authorities) to state that there is a system of internal control in place that is designed to
ensure that key risks are managed. This should always include risks in relation to
partnerships.