5 November 2010
Social care groups have welcomed the scrapping of the Care Quality Commission’s annual assessments of councils’ care services.
Social care minister Paul Burstow this week said that the commission’s assessments ‘weren’t the best way of tackling underperformance’. He said that the government had ‘listened’ to interested groups and councils will not now be required to submit data for 2010/11
Burstow told the National Clinical Assessment Service conference on November 3 that the government was bringing in ‘real time, ongoing, relevant measures of performance, not the arbitrary snapshots that currently the system takes in’. This would be a ‘more proportionate and constructive system, built around local accountability.
He added: ‘The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services and the Local Government Group are exploring how this will work. And we are working closely with them as we put the new arrangements in place.’
David Parsons, chair of the Local Government Group’s improvement board, said: ‘The scrapping of the annual assessment of adult care is a positive step towards the common-sense inspection approach which councils have been arguing for. The next logical step is to get rid of the equivalent assessments of children’s services carried out by Ofsted.
‘Local government leaders have been working hard to reduce the burden of inspection. Councils are ready to do the important job of monitoring their own and each other’s performance, making sure services get better all the time but without the top-heavy bureaucracy which wastes taxpayers’ money.’
The CQC said it ‘recognised the need for change’. Chief executive Cynthia Bower said: ‘We welcome this move to further devolve responsibility for the monitoring and improvement of council performance, bringing it closer to local people. This supports the drive to have more local accountability of public services.’
A CQC spokesman said it was ‘too early to say’ whether there would be any redundancies at the commission as a result of the change. ‘We are reassessing the responsibilities and roles or staff to see where we go from there.’
The CQC will publish its final annual assessment of council social care services on November 25.
