What we did
We worked together with five partner inspectorates to introduce Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) in April 2009. Our inspectorate partners included the Care Quality Commission, HMI Constabulary, HMI Prisons, HMI Probation and Ofsted. CAA looked at how well public services like education, waste and recycling, health and social care, the police and the fire service were performing and how well they worked together to achieve better results for their communities. It was a fundamental change in our approach to the assessment of local public services. We designed it to focus on what really mattered to local people.
CAA was forward-looking, promoted learning and helped local public services identify any risks to them delivering on their local priorities.
We designed CAA to provide:
- a catalyst for improvement: better local outcomes, more effective partnership working, more responsive services and better value for money;
- independent assurance for citizens, service users and taxpayers;
- an independent evidence base for central government on progress with national priorities and improving local services; and
- a means of focusing, rationalising and coordinating inspection.
Through CAA we also wanted to promote better engagement with local communities, innovation and well-managed risk-taking.
CAA was made up of two parts:
- An area assessment – this looked at how well local public services were working together to make things better for local people across the whole area, focusing on local priorities and prospects for improvement.
- An organisational assessment for councils and fire and rescue authorities - this combined the external auditor’s assessment of value for money in the use of resources with a joint inspectorate assessment of council service performance.
This video, 'CAA - a story about people and places' (MP4, 13.4Mb) gives more information about CAA and how it was reported. A transcript of the video (PDF, 58Kb) is also available.
We published the results of CAA on the Oneplace website. This gave the public clear and impartial information about how well they were served by their local public services, how that compared with elsewhere and what the prospects were for improvement of quality of life in their area.