Audit and Inspection

All councils in England are subject to audit and inspection by the Audit Commission. The Commission is an independent regulatory body responsible for ensuring that public money is spent economically, efficiently and effectively, to achieve high quality local services for the public.

The Audit Commission undertakes a range of inspection activity on councils, in particular, comprehensive performance assessments and service inspections.  Comprehensive Performance Assessments of councils were introduced in 2002 and provide an overall conclusion about whether a council is “excellent”, “good”, “fair”, “weak” or “poor”.  Bromsgrove District Council entered into voluntary engagement with Central Government in 2004 to support our recovery and as part of this engagement accepted a rating of “poor” without going through a formal CPA.  The Council has been through a number of corporate governance inspections and a progress assessment and expects to go through a formal CPA in 2007.  The Council has an Improvement Plan which sets out in detail the actions we plan to take to improve our CPA rating.

The CPA framework for district councils was updated in July 2006 and contains key lines of enquiry are available.  These detail the level of corporate governance and service performance the Council needs to achieve.  The Council has just completed its CPA Self-Assessment against these key lines of enquiry and will be going through a CPA in February 2007.

The Council has also undergone a range of service inspections in recent years.

Documents

Corporate Assessment June 2007  (120.35 KB)

CPA Self Assessment Final Version 2007  (884.61 KB)

CPA - Corporate Assessment Key Lines of Enquiry  (179.35 KB)

CPA - district council framework from 2006 (April 2006)  (475.34 KB)

CPA for district, the Harder Test  (803.95 KB)

Progress Assessment (December 2006)  (1.63 MB)

Strategic Housing Service Inspection (July 2006)  (3.15 MB)

Corporate Governance Re-inspection (2003) Audit Commission

Corporate Governance Inspection (2001) Audit Commission

Improvement Plan 2008/09 - November 2008  (694.06 KB)