Comments on: Abolish the Audit Commission, Ofsted and more

By: onlineFOCUS - News and Stuff For Rochford District » Truly “Our Kind Of Candidate”

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:23:04 +0000

[...] at an item on the Social Liberal Forum about reining in the Audit Commission we were pleased to see Susan’s comments about creating [...]

By: Paul Fox

Paul Fox — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:58:28 +0000

Broadly agree with the main article, and sorry to disagree with Chris (White) who has declared his interest! The Audit Commission in the 90s was useful – performed the audit function and did VFM reports comparing and establishing best practice – since then it has been corrupted and extended into areas essentially beyond its competence as a key part of the culture of targets and spin.

In too many areas Local Government is now basically a case of keeping the auditors happy – if you do that then you can keep the members happy and they in turn can face the electorate (who may well see through all of this – but if they do you get a new lot of members and so the cycle starts again!)

CAA won’t help as it pretends that the local authority has a local leadership role that in reality it doesn’t even if we would like it too and takes the Audit Commission further beyond its remit. (e.g. under CAA the auditors can work out that lack of affordable housing is an issue but then they blame the council for that – yet who actually has the financial capacity do tackle this issue – the government agency is the Homes & Communities Agency but they are not part of the CAA remit – so so-called Comprehensive Performance Assessment is not really very comprehensive at all…….I could go on

Yes, bring back real audit and inspection /intervention targeted according to risk. Perhaps we could even have local government accounts that lay people or even councillors could understand.

If we believe in risk based regulation – then can anyone now justify the regulation / audit / inspection framework for local government compared to that of the financial services / banking industry? In most areas of the public sector the best risk management from the point of view of staff is to rely on past auditor recommendations rather than professional judgement based on the actual circumstances- safest for the staff isn’t always the same as best for the customer / client.

Over the next decade the price of the financial / economic mess we are in will be paid in public sector cuts – better to cut the non-productive audit and bureaucratic command and control regimes (and I include the quangos, central government departments and the consequent costs in local government) than front line services.

By: David Heigham

David Heigham — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:22:08 +0000

The Audit Commission do a great deal of very valuable work on auditing and on value for money. It is valuable because it useful to locla managers and potentially very relevant to local political responsibility.
But can anyone recall anything at all done by our national inspection functions that has been systematically useful to anyone? Occasional crack downs on individual cases of under-performance don’t count: the longer term effect of those is to confuse who is accountable. Confused accountabilities and responsibilities can be relied upon to produce future problems.
Before we design some new, less damaging, less wasteful and less ineffective agency to replace the lumbering inspection complex which is one of Labour’s legacies, don’t we need to sat why and how it is likely to function better than no inspectorates at all?

By: Steve Comer

Steve Comer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:49:20 +0000

I can accept that audit (especially financial audit) may be different and may require some common national standards, but most of the inspection regimes are simply biureacracies which distort priorities.

I remember meeting a northern Labour leader at an IDeA event who compared his council with the one that bordered it. The next door Labour council had 4* CPA improving well etc, and his was, well a bit of a basket case realy. When challenged he said ‘”we only lost one bloody seat at t’elections, and them buggers are now in no overall control.”
A tad cynical perhaps, but I think it shows there can be a gap between what inspectors see and what local people feel….

By: Telling Lies!!!

Telling Lies!!! — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:07:08 +0000

Yes certainly abolish a great many inspection agencies, but it’s not clear what your’re replacing them with.

If the single local inspection body “clearly needs to be independent of local government” who appoints the members?

The public should. The principle is that whoever runs public services should be directly accountable to the public at the lowest appropriate level. I think your new inpection agencies should really be reempowered local councils without centrally imposed regimes, and extendedly empowered (couldn’t think of a better term unfortunately) to have the right to audit local NHS etc. operations, and have the same powers to push changes as the current inspectors.

Localism means subsidiarity and democracy – let councils run the services that can be run locally, and let them inspect those that can’t.