The review was a four-day peer assessment about how we work as a council.
Directors, chief executives and a Council Leader, all from different councils, comprised the visiting team.
They spoke with more than 120 colleagues, councillors and partners. This took the format of group discussions/workshops, and one-to-one meetings.
What does the report cover?
The peer review report explores:
- Local priorities and outcomes: Are our priorities clear and informed by the local context?
- Organisational and place leadership: Does we provide effective local leadership? Are there good relationships with partner organisations and local communities?
- Governance and culture: Are there clear and robust governance arrangements? Is there a culture of respect, challenge and scrutiny?
- Financial planning and management: Do we have a clear understanding of our current financial position? Does we have a strategy and a clear plan to address its financial challenges?
- Capacity for improvement: Are we able to support delivery of local priorities? Does the council have the capacity to improve?
Why we’re pleased to accept the report
The purpose of a peer review is to identify what improvements we could and should make. It’s about welcoming challenge at every level, to ensure we’re performing as highly as possible. We welcome constructive challenge and scrutiny, and therefore broadly welcome the report’s recommendations.
We’re also pleased that the report covers a number of areas of good practice at the council including:
- How we’ve been integral in helping to drive forward town centre regeneration
- Our sustainable transport vision and commitment to rolling out 105 electric buses as part of our ZEBRA programme
- Our commitment to “maintaining and enhancing” the public service offer through schemes like the Living Well Hub and WVR College’s health and social care academy
- Our strong track record of securing funding to invest in Warrington
- Our overall good performance across our services, supported by a proud, motivated workforce who are invested in both Warrington and the council
- Good staff engagement schemes and positive relationships with Trade Unions
- How we are seen as a trusted partner that has established good relationships across the borough and beyond
- That in comparison with other councils, we perform well across a number of important indicators, for example around children’s social care performance, the number of affordable homes being delivered, and overall satisfaction of people who use our adult social care services
The report also states that we are a council driven to improve the lives of our residents, acknowledging that there is good work going on at the council, and there are good stories to tell.
The report in context
We are grateful for the work of the peer challenge team and, to a very large extent, agree with the findings of the report.
It does need to be acknowledged that things have changed significantly since the report, despite the team visiting fairly recently in March. We and the peer challenge team agree that these reports, by nature, are an assessment of ‘a point in time’.
The LGA peer challenge team also understands and supports that we might not agree with everything that is in the report. We appreciate that the peer team only had a limited amount of time to spend in Warrington, with only a limited number of conversations, and so their evidence base for forming some conclusions won’t have been extensive.
That being said, we’re fully committed to making sure that we deliver an action plan in response to the report’s recommendations. The majority of the report’s recommendations will be underpinned by a new corporate strategy and plan, which will be led by our new Cabinet, with support from senior officers. This is something that we will be working on this year, to give us a refreshed vision and priorities.
What happens next?
We will be taking our (draft) action plan, in response to the LGA report, to Cabinet in October.
While this plan will detail our intended steps to address the recommendations in the report, we also need to be clear that there are a number of the recommendations, either in whole or in part, that we’ve already acted on.
For example, we:
- have recently reviewed our constitution to enable more public involvement in our democratic structures (linked to recommendation four), by now allowing public questions at Cabinet meetings.
- have published our action plan in response to the recent Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) report (linked to recommendation seven)
- continue to work in earnest to address the big budget challenge we face in 2025/26 (linked to recommendation 6) with weekly director sessions with finance teams
Our action plan, that we will be agreeing and publishing in the coming weeks, will have even more detail about how we intend to respond to, and implement, the report’s findings.
Our action plan will be published as soon as possible, but we need a little bit more time to work through how we can practically implement all of the recommendations. For example, one of the recommendations is around setting up an independently chaired ‘assurance and development group’. While we’re supportive of further scrutiny – we’re always open to professional challenge – we intend to work with the LGA, positively, to understand how this group will best fit within and complement our existing governance structures.