By Jaimie Kaffash
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.
