The government has announced that Comprehensive Area Assessment is to be abolished. The details and timing are yet to be announced.
Oneplace, the reporting website for Comprehensive Area Assessment, is now live. The site includes independent information about how councils, police, health services and others are tackling the major issues in every area in England. Visit the site at oneplace.audit-commission.gov.uk/.
Brought to you jointly by the Audit Commission, the Care Quality Commission, Ofsted and Her Majesty's Inspectorates of Constabulary, Prisons and Probation, Oneplace provides assessments of performance covering all 152 major areas in England.
It's the first time that auditors and inspectors from these six organisations have come together to publish their findings, making them directly available to the public in everyday language – a more streamlined approach that has reduced the cost of inspection.
In Oneplace you can find out how well local services work together to meet both their own priorities and government indicators on, for example, anti-social behaviour and teenage pregnancy.
It will also feature the ratings for councils, and fire and rescue authorities. Building on local government's recent track record of improvement, the Audit Commission is publishing assessments of councils on a revised basis, stripping out much of the detail and reflecting today's challenges such as carbon reduction. The new assessments look at how well councils and fire and rescue authorities manage their performance, and make use of the resources available to them.
The website also links to the ratings from Ofsted on children's services, which are published on Wednesday 9 December, and the Care Quality Commission's assessments of adult social care, released last week.