Roger Gambba-Jones

I'm not a great lover of the inspect it, measure it, mark it, score it, culture that has become such a part of government in this country, especially when a previous head of OFSTED recently went on the record as saying that the school inspection process is a complete waste of time and money.

Add to this the tragic events in Haringey when their Childrens Services inspection was assessed as good, whilst one of the children they were supposed to protecting was being abused in a way that eventually lead to his death.

All that said, South Holland District Council has just been awarded an Excellent score under the external inspection system known as CPA, Comprehensive Performance Assessment. 

As an insider, I can confirm that whilst not everything we do is perfect by any means, the effort we put in to trying to make it so, is second to none.  We are a small council, with very limited uncommitted money to spend and an ever increasing amount of commitments to spend it on. 

Whilst we cannot claim the same level of high profile headline grabbing projects as some of the big boys in local goverment, what we can claim is that we try to do the very best we can with what we have and we appear to be able do that better than many of our peers.  Under such circumstances, this Excellent score is a tribute to the amount of effort that is put in by all concerned and in particular to the staff who make it all happen day after day.  

When my kids were at school and would bring home the dreaded school report, I always used to tell them that, as long as it had an A in the effort column, I wouldn't be disappointed by the scores in the other columns.    

A previous leader of SHDC who is now a big cheese on the county council used to say of the relationship between officers and members, "We can't do it without them and they shouldn't do it with us".