Feedback from the Audit Commission

"The quality of advice was the thing that added most value - the experience, expertise and thought evident in all contributions....

Judicious well-made contributions that made an important difference to managing potential risks."

Work undertaken for the Audit Commission

Strategy and analysis

A significant example of our strategy work is the project we undertook with the Audit Commission to develop a set of proposals for the future of inspection and audit in response to the Department for Communities and Local Government’s consultation paper Inspection Reform: The Future of Local Services Inspection. The government's proposals to 're-focus, rationalise and reduce the volume of inspection in order to make it more effective at achieving better service outcomes' represented a significant corporate risk for the Commission that needed to be managed effectively if it were not to face more wide-ranging change to its powers, scope and scale of work.

We worked alongside the Project Board to:

  • evaluate the government’s proposals; systematically mapping the government's proposed changes, assessing how and whether they will help improve public service outcomes, who supported the proposals and what they hope to achieve, how likely the changes are to happen and the implications for the Commission if they did.
  • draw up a vision of how inspection can be further developed to help improve public service outcomes in the new world envisaged by the government. This needed to dovetail closely with the Commission’s Strategic Plan and work on the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA)
  • work out how to make the Commission’s case for change through a programme of conversations with key decision-makers and stakeholders to understand their views of the current situation better, listen to their views about what should change and to make the case for a new model that can help deliver better public service outcomes.
  • contribute to and critically review the Commission’s submission.
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