The first round of Comprehensive Performance Assessments for single tier and county councils identified community leadership as a key driver for improvement.

The briefing explains the concept of community leadership, provides headline messages and findings from the corporate assessments, describes critical success factors that have resulted in improved community leadership and identifies notable practice where community leadership is working well.

Community leadership has three aspects:

This briefing takes practice from corporate assessments to aid local authorities to be more effective in and improve their community leadership role.

The Audit Commission carried out corporate assessments at each council judging strengths and weaknesses and a judgment about its ability to improve. Part of the assessments examined how councils were fulfilling their community leadership role.

The Audit Commission found that most councils had a positive story to tell. Seventy two councils demonstrated strong community leadership and commitment to extending this leadership particularly through partnerships. The best councils had prepared ambitious community strategies in consultation with, and owned by, other partners.

A representative sample of corporate assessment reports were analysed identifying five critical factors successful to community leadership:

Audit Commission
Sir Andrew Foster, tel. +44 020 7828 1212

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/04/2003

Audit Commission

research

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration > Community development

Citizens' participation, Capacity building