The Gotland County Administrative Board. A public-agency analysis (2009:10)

On behalf of the Government, the Swedish Agency for Public Management has carried out a public-agency analysis of the County Administrative Board (CAB) in the county of Gotland. The assignment has included describing how the CAB performs its functions and how internal and external factors that are especially important for its activities affect the scope for conducting them. The assignment has also included clarifying areas of activity with a particular bearing on the CAB’s future prospects of fulfilling its remit. The results of the analysis are to be used primarily as a basis for the Government’s performance dialogue with the Gotland CAB management.

Demographically, with its 57,000 inhabitants, Gotland is Sweden’s smallest county. Its CAB is one of the smallest in terms of the scale of its activities. Essentially, its functions are the same as those of most other CABs, but it has only one municipality to supervise, advise and work with. Another difference is that since 1998, on a trial basis, the Gotland CAB has also been responsible for certain tasks in forest policy. Starting in 2007, this trial has also included some functions in employment policy. As a proportion of the CAB’s entire activities, the trial activities made up approximately a quarter in 2008, against nearly half in 2007.

The Government’s decision to discontinue the trial involving employment policy, combined with general financial austerity, brought about extensive restructuring and reform work at the CAB. The need to use appropriation credit also arose. In the Gotland CAB’s estimation, this credit will need to be used over the next two years as well, partly as a consequence of another two activities being lost by the CAB in 2010.

Since 2005, to carry out its tasks, the CAB has had a team organisation aimed at increasing flexibility and reducing vulnerability in its activities. Simultaneously, a new way of internally managing activities was introduced. A management group or team, comprising the county director and four managers, controls activities through assignments in the operational teams, of which there are currently 16. The operational teams lack managers but sometimes have one or two team coordinators. The organisation and the changed working procedure have not been evaluated by the CAB in a coherent way.

Broadly speaking, employees are in favour of the teams’ increased responsibility. However, criticism is levelled against the organisation’s functioning, including the distribution of specialist areas among several teams with different managers, and also difficulties in cooperating across team boundaries. Employees have long criticised the fact that the team coordinators’ roles and functions have not been made clear. In a formal sense, they lack both responsibility and powers. From an external point of view, it may be difficult to know who is formally responsible for an activity. It is the way in which forestry activities, above all, are organised that incurs this kind of criticism.

The CAB’s governance style means that its leaders have delegated to the operational teams a high degree of responsibility for interpreting and deciding on the specific content of activities, based on the work plan and the management team’s assignment descriptions — documents that are worded in general terms. One of the county management’s priorities for activities in 2008 was to rationalise case handling, but there were no detailed definitions of what was to be achieved and when. Nor has it been feasible to demonstrate any practical results of this work.

Obtaining an overview of what the Gotland CAB is achieving and how it is performing is difficult. The reports on its work are not systematic or of such a kind as to allow an appraisal of how well it is fulfilling its overall remit. This may be explained by the heterogeneity of its activities and the large number of people who require and receive information about its performance. It is also explained by the fact that the Government’s feedback requirements are more oriented towards accounts of the CAB’s work and actions than to their specific outcomes. In addition, the selection criteria for the information presented in the CAB’s annual report are unclear.

The statistics that all Sweden’s CABs keep on their activities should be usable for comparative purposes. However, further information and more detailed analysis are not infrequently required for an assessment of why, for example, the Gotland CAB and other CABs have divergent outcomes and results. The trial activities at the Gotland CAB further impair its comparability with other CABs since, to date, these have been reported within the existing structure of activities.

Case administration is an area in which some statistics that are common to all the CABs are kept. They show, for example, that out of all Sweden’s CABs the one on Gotland has the smallest volume of cases. They also show that the staff cutbacks at the Gotland CAB have not exerted an adverse effect on proportions of different case types. Compared with the average for all the CABs, that of Gotland appears to have a slightly lower proportion of decisions that are appealed; at the same time, however, of those decisions that have been reviewed by a higher authority the Gotland CAB has the highest proportion of decisions changed.

There is much evidence that case administration is a high-priority task in the teams, and that external requirements exert more control than the priorities adopted by the county management. However, the management group’s overview of the CAB’s overall work of setting targets for handling times is inadequate. Individual teams have usually themselves taken the initiative for setting these targets, but the outcome is not always followed up.

There is an ambition at the CAB to orient activities towards their users, but it is difficult to discern what practical impact this ambition has on the activities and their orientation. Responsibility for the dialogue with the users rests on the individual teams. No general user surveys have been carried out. The interviews conducted by the Agency for Public Management with representatives of some of the CAB’s major target or user groups on Gotland provide a picture of a CAB whose work and also performance in its various roles are of varying quality. The opinions expressed bear witness to the vulnerable situation the CAB is in, both financially and in terms of skills.

In relation to the municipality of Gotland, the CAB is perceived as functioning well when it comes to issues of regional development, environmental protection and animal protection, but somewhat worse with respect to food inspection. On the other hand, the CAB is perceived as incapable of performing its functions in spatial planning to a fully satisfactory standard. The CAB is criticised both by the Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF) and by the Church of Sweden for its way of dealing with forest issues. In its work on matters of church-related cultural heritage, the CAB is perceived as functioning well. There is concern among farmers that the CAB’s resources will affect its scope for performing its tasks in the farm sector when it comes to providing advice, but also administering state remuneration to farmers.

Many activities at the Gotland CAB are extremely small, and the CAB tries in various ways to cope with those that are vulnerable in terms of skills. The CAB has difficulty in performing some of its own functions unaided, since the skills are lacking. In several cases, it engages other CABs to perform certain tasks. Occasionally, decision-making has also been delegated to another CAB. There is a wish on the part of the management to broaden the employees’ areas of expertise. However, in response to the CAB’s financial problems, measures to develop skills were made a lower priority in 2007–08. At present, the CAB has no current policy and plan for skills provision.

When an activity is on a small scale and managed by one or a few officers, contacts with individual representatives of a target group may easily assume a personal nature. An officer may also be obliged to serve in several of the CAB’s roles vis-à-vis the same users. In relation to the only municipality in the county, too, the small size of the CAB is sometimes striking. The CAB has no policy on how to deal with situations involving conflicts of interest or disqualification.

Overall, the Agency for Public Management finds that there are weaknesses in the CAB’s internal governance and control. Its financial straits and the large-scale restructuring that ensued when the pilot project in employment policy was discontinued at year-end 2007 have strikingly affected activities, especially regarding the management’s strategic efforts. Based on an overview analysis of the CAB’s activities, a few selected results and interviews with CAB officers, the Agency has not found any indications of large-scale problems concerning the CAB’s performance of its tasks. The CAB appears to be fulfilling its core functions, either on its own or with other CABs’ assistance. On the other hand, this should be weighed up against, for example, the opinions of quality in implementation that have emerged in the Agency’s interviews with some central target groups on Gotland.

There is considerable concern about what may happen to the Gotland CAB in the years ahead. This anxiety stems from the insufficient financial resources, but also from the many investigations that generally relate to the CABs’ functions and organisation. For the Gotland CAB, the Government’s forthcoming decision based on its investigation of forest-policy implementation on Gotland is crucial. The CAB is concerned about what the implications for its other activities would be if responsibility for forest issues were to be given back to the Swedish Forest Agency.

The forestry work conducted by the CAB makes up roughly a quarter of its total activities, in terms of both full-time annual employees and costs, the latter amounting to SEK 39 million out of the total of SEK 141m for 2008. Forest activities involve public-agency functions, but also large-scale commissioned activities. In cooperation between the Public Employment Service, the municipality of Gotland and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, people are sent for occupational training, rehabilitation and employment in the CAB’s commissioned activities. Within the framework of these activities, services are also provided for individual forest owners and the CAB’s own teams.

Starting on 1 January 2009, the Government tightened requirements applying to commissioned forestry activities. The CAB has not yet investigated the impact this will have on the CAB. Accordingly, some portions of activities may have a focus and be on a scale that exceeds what is appropriate or allowed. The Government does not impose any requirements on the CAB to report cumulative financial results for various types of commissioned work and client groups. It is thus not evident from the annual report whether the commissioned activities are being run with full cost coverage or whether certain services or client groups are subsidising others.

If the Government’s decision means that responsibility for forest issues goes back to the Swedish Forest Agency, the CAB’s view is that its activities will be on too small a scale for the CAB to function as a cohesive authority in its own right. One of the CAB’s conclusions is that it will not be able to finance its own overheads. The view of the Agency for Public Management is that more detailed analysis of the CAB’s forestry work, including its commissioned activities, is required. Only after this analysis can the Agency express an opinion about the bearing of the forestry work on the CAB’s scope for carrying out its functions, and managing its finances, satisfactorily if its forestry remit we