CAA's definitely abolished

I wonder how much the abolition of CAA’s will save Babergh? These are, to quote Eric Pickles, ‘costly top down reports, officially known as Comprehensive Area Assessments’.

Some of the benefits will be offset by the new requirement to publish all local authority expenditure in excess of £500 however, and if the Government forces us to go back to weekly refuse collections the savings will be further eroded. So perhaps it will be swings and roundabouts after all and we will have to continue to look elsewhere to meet our financial challenges.

The abolition of CAA’s should make a difference however. In addition to freeing up Councillor and officer time, statistics from elsewhere speak for themselves.

According to the Department for Communities and Local Government Website, Leicestershire councils, for example, found they had 90 full time staff collecting and processing more than 3,000 individual data items for central government at a cost of £3.7m a year. They also faced 83 different inspections every year.

We need to see more red tape disappear.