Local transport plans - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 338

Box 20.2 Performance management and direct engagement
From DfT 2004c Full Guidance on LTPs: Second Edition paras 8-9
Consistent with the Prime Minister's principles of public service reform, the Department
sees itself as having three main roles in delivering better local transport. Firstly, it
must continue to develop the structures of our relationship with local partners, in a
way that enables them to innovate and pursue excellence. Secondly, it must provide
clear strategic leadership, focused on the real-world results that both central and
local government want to deliver. Thirdly, it must provide public investment in a
way that delivers the best possible value for money to taxpayers. The Department
for Transport intends to develop the LTP system to deliver these objectives, by
emphasising its role as a performance management system.
Performance management requires the parties involved to understand what their
shared objectives and resources are, to work together to set ambitious but realistic
targets for delivering those objectives, and to challenge each other to do better,
where possible. The Government therefore intends to engage with all local transport
authorities - in groups or individually - as they develop their LTPs, to ensure that
those LTPs reflect the principles of effective performance management. The aim of
this engagement is not to impose a central strategy on local authorities, but to help
authorities develop local transport strategies and plans that are effective and that
will deliver real improvements in outcomes, and an appropriate set of targets and
objectives against which performance can be tracked.
possible for central-local relations to be conducted quite so exclusively within the
rather ethereal realms of performance measurement and with so little concern for the
actual content of programmes remains to be seen.
For LTP2 authorities were required to set targets for 2010/11 in relation to a
number of key outcome or 'mandatory' indicators (shown in Table 20.3). They were
also asked to identify intermediate outcomes for these indicators which represented a
trajectory of change from the baseline year (2003/04) towards the target against which
progress could subsequently be compared. Authorities were at liberty to set additional
targets and indicators but were cautioned that too many were likely to prove counter-
productive.
For the targets linked to mandatory indicators, authorities were asked to include
in their LTPs:
• evidence that the target was both ambitious and realistic (having regard to likely
funding)
• the key actions of local government and other partners needed to achieve it
• the principal risks to achievement and how these are to be managed.
From April 2009 specific reporting on the Best Value and LTP2 mandatory
indicators is superseded by local authorities' overall reporting on the national indicator
set. As shown in Table 20.3 nine of the previous seventeen transport indicators are
carried forward into the national set. Of the remaining eight, DfT will continue to
produce statistics related to two: total slight casualties and change in area-wide traffic