'Conservative Council covers up rapidly falling standards' - Rendel

10.43.14am UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 8th Aug 2007

"The Conservative Council has today been caught out trying to cover up a serious fall-off in performance," said Councillor David Rendel.

Councillor Rendel was commenting on figures released by West Berkshire Council in response to a question he asked at the meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Commission on 10 July. Following further investigation by Mr Rendel, it is now clear that the Council's performance in meeting even its own targets has gone rapidly downhill.

"At the Overview & Scrutiny Commission I took the opportunity to cross-examine the Conservatives about their performance statistics. I was told that it was not possible to compare the 2006/7 report to the previous year as a number of targets had changed."

Mr Rendel then requested a list of all those indicators which were directly comparable to the previous year and unearthed alarming slippages over just 12 months. Newly-released Council figures show that there were 16 such indicators. Those where serious concerns and problems were found were marked with a "red traffic light".

"In 2005/6 just 3 of the traffic lights were on red - the Council's own figures indicate that this has doubled to 6 in the space of a year. The Council claimed that "The overall picture for 2006/07 is very positive". But they failed to reveal that there had been an alarming fall-off in performance compared to the previous year.

"Even more worryingly, I have now discovered that a seventh indicator was marked with a green traffic light when it should, under the Council's own criteria, have been given a red. This concerned the level of customer satisfaction with communications with the Council.

"Originally this was to be measured by the Council's "Annual Satisfaction Survey". But when the Council discovered that they had not met their own target according to this survey, they decided instead to judge themselves by a different survey. This second survey used different methods both to ask the questions and to choose who answered them. However not even that is the end of the story, as I have now discovered that the survey the Council ended up using did not even take place in 2006/07 but in the previous year. There is absolutely no excuse for using a 2005/06 survey to replace a 2006/07 survey in order to fudge the traffic light setting in 06/07!

"An increase in missed targets from 3 out of 16 to 7 out of 16 in just one year demonstrates how rapidly the Conservative Council's performance is going downhill. I hope they will now do something about it instead of just trying to cover it up".