Audit Commission

What we did

We carried out corporate government inspections where we had serious concerns about the effectiveness of a council’s corporate governance arrangements. Between 2000 and 2010, carried out 20 corporate governance inspections.

How we did it

Our approach to corporate governance inspections carried out between 2006 and 2009 is set out in the following documents:

Corporate governance inspection – the revised framework from May 2006 (PDF, 254kb) ( PDF, 254kb )

Corporate governance inspection: Key lines of enquiry 2006 (PDF, 156kb) ( PDF, 156kb )

In January 2010, we consulted on a revised methodology for corporate governance inspection as part of a wider review of our inspection framework to take account of the introduction of Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA). We carried out one inspection in 2010 using the revised methodology.

Corporate governance inspection: Draft revised methodology January 2010 (PDF, 185kb) ( PDF, 185kb )

Inspection results

The inspection reports for councils published between 2000 and 2011 are in date order starting with the most recent.

Our inspection spreadsheet below enables you to search for reports by council, inspection category or date:

Local Government inspection reports spreadsheet (XLS, 757kb) ( XLS, 664kb )

What we learnt

The Commission’s 2003 report Corporate Governance: Improvement and Trust in Local Public Services explored the contribution that corporate governance makes to the quality of public services. It described some of the strengths of governance arrangements in the public sector and some of the areas that were most in need of attention.

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