Inspection reports
Inspections of services by statutory agencies such as the Social Services Inspectorate, OfSTED, the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate and the Audit Commission assess the quality of the services we deliver and help us to identify how they can improve.
The key findings of the most recent major service inspections can be accessed via the list below. The future combined inspection and audit programme has been agreed between the authority and the national inspection agencies up until 2006.
Some documents listed here are presented in pdf format. You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader from our help pages. Additional tools to help those reading a pdf document with a screen reader can also be found there.
Recent inspections
- Comprehensive performance assessment 2003 - the overall inspection scheme for local government
- Audit Commission (AC) annual audit letter 2003
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- summarising the key issues arising from the AC's annual audit and inspection programme - Performance management audit report 2003 - a review of the council's performance management arrangements
- Local education authority OfSTED report 2003 - how our education service is performing
Access further OfSTED reports
- Benefit Fraud Inspectorate report 2004 [due September 2004) - evaluating the quality of our of our benefit service
- AC customer contact inspection report 2004 - reporting on the way customers access council services
Inspections of best value reviews
The Audit Commission has carried out inspections following best value reviews, below is a list of the inspected reviews with the year they were carried out and their scores.
The scores are for 2 judgements:
- Judgement 1 - how good the current service is, 3 star (excellent) to 0 star (poor)
- Judgement 2 - prospects for improvement, excellent, promising, uncertain or none
Click on the name of the review to see the inspector's report.
- Adult guidance, 2001 - 2 star, promising
- Asset management and education, 2001 - 2 star, promising
- Building cleaning, 2001 - 2 star, excellent
- Customer contact, 2004 - 2 star, excellent
- Early years provision, 2001 - 1 star, promising
- Education awards, 2001 - 1 star, promising
- Education support for looked after children, 2001 - 1 star, promising
- Food safety, 2001 - 3 star, promising
- Highway development control (customer contact), 2001 - 3 star, promising
- Housing repairs/maintenance, 2002 - 0 star, promising
- Housing strategy, 2001 - 1 star, uncertain
- Indoor leisure, 2002 - 1 star, none
- Information management, education, 2001 - 1 star, promising
- Markets, 2001 - 0 star, excellent
- Provision of equipment (older people), 2001 - 1 star, promising
- Public conveniences, 2001 - 0 star, uncertain
- Right to buy re-inspection, 2003 - 1 star, excellent
- Right to buy, 2001 - 0 star, promising
- Security, 2001 - 0 star, promising
- Street-based services, 2002 - 0 star, promising
- Support to schools causing concern, 2001 - 2 star, promising
An account of the progress we have made in addressing the key inspection findings of services currently deemed to be poor (0 star) will be available here.