Big week for Public Service Changes!

The pre-budget report may be the most important event of the week, but it stands amid other announcements that reflect the way public services are changing. We've also seen the first release of results from a new way of monitoring local councils' performance, plus the Treasury report on public sector reform, Smarter Government,

Oneplace Launch
The new framework for inspecting local services, known as Oneplace and accessible via the government's Directgov website, is a bid to get over the well-known problem of previous inspections: councils were capable of meeting the targets, but missing the point. Their internal workings could be four-star, but the services they were actually delivering might fall well short of excellence.

Oneplace assesses not just councils, but also police authorities, primary care trusts and fire and rescue services. The output is not a league table or star system, but a "narrative in plain English" of the priorities that areas have themselves set. The initial launch appeared to be a success with reports that on the first day the site was visited by more than 54,000 people a volume which led to the collapse of the site for a period.

The new monitoring system, which covers 152 areas of England, uses a flag system to signal examples of particularly good or bad practice.

A Solution to better Services?
It's new for local areas and it's new for the six inspectorates involved, led by the local authority watchdog, the Audit Commission. However, there has already been criticism of the amount of time and resource local authorities must now allocate to various inspection and reporting processes. And the key question remains will it get closer to what the public perceive as good-value local public services?

Links
Oneplace
Audit Commission Website
Audit Commission Tweets
DirectGov
Adapted from original article featured in The Guardian