The Audit Commission's Housing Inspectorate was set up in April 2000 to inspect local authority housing services under the Local Government Act 1999. Since then, the Inspectorate has assessed and publicly reported on 439 housing services delivered by local authorities in England and Wales (up until February 2004).
The Inspectorate's responsibilities have expanded since it was established. During 2002/03 it became responsible for inspecting the Supporting People Frameworks operated by administering local authorities. The Office for the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) also gave it responsibility for assessing the prospectuses prepared by Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders in nine areas in England, designated by the Government as suffering from particularly low demand in their housing markets. In addition, since April 2003 it has been responsible for inspecting housing associations and other social landlords registered with the Housing Corporation.
The purpose of this report is to examine the factors that have resulted in organisations significantly improving their performance as judged by our inspection activity. In total, we have evaluated 20 cases, all of which involve initial inspections that were carried out before July 2002. Of the 20 cases reviewed, 5 were associated with the Government's ALMO programme and 15 involved the re-inspection of zero star services (which were subsequently judged to be at least fair services on re-inspection).
This report seeks to explore the building blocks for improvement; what drives change and how change can be implemented successfully. Once in place, these building blocks can be used to continue to improve performance all the way to excellence, as some councils and ALMOs have already demonstrated. The rest of the report considers these factors in greater detail using the case studies to illustrate their importance.