After taking office in 1997 , the New Labour government under Tony Blair pursued two different tracks.
First, in subscribing to NPM thinking the government imposed on the local authorities a rigorous centrally determined and controlled system of performance management. While revoking the predecessor government's legislation on CCT (and thus distancing itself from the latter's fixation on privatisation at almost any price), the Blair government, after conducting an extensive pilot programme, installed a 'Best Value' (BV) regime which came into operation for all English local authorities in April 2000. It required councils to make arrangements-in the from of an annual Best Value Performance Plan and regular service-specific and cross-cutting reviews-to secure continuos improvement in the way they undertake all their service responsibilities. All functions of an authority are subject to inspection at least once every five years by an existing special inspectorate or by the Audit Commission's Best Value Inspectorate. The Secretary of State has wide-ranging powers to intervene elehere a local authority is judged by inspectors not to be delivering a BV service. It was critically observed that, 'while it would be rid of the deeply unpopular CCT regime,Best Value would prove every bit as centrally prescriptive and potentially even more interventionist'(Wilson and Game,2002:337). Obviously reacting to the 'extremely widespread antipathy to the inspections' (ibid340) among local authorities, and also to the impracticability and high 'transaction costs' of locally implementing the BV regime, the Blair government has in the meantime turned to, and given, priority tp, 'Comprehensive Performance Assessments'(CPAs) which are designed as