Message From Steve Bundred, Chief Executive of the Audit Commission:
On 1 April 2008 the Audit Commission will take over responsibility for benefits inspections and assurance from the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI).
In addition to the obvious and continuing need to provide assurance that approximately £15 billion of public money is spent as intended, the Commission's approach will be informed by the vital contribution benefit services make to the social and economic wellbeing of an area and the significant contribution to local authorities' strategies to address poverty, deprivation, homelessness and worklessness.
The Commission will develop a benefit service framework to bring together the strands of its benefit work, to develop a coherent risk-based, proportionate and efficient approach. It is reviewing all aspects of its benefit work, including the work appointed auditors undertake on claim certification and auditors' data quality work, which will be applied to key benefit performance indicators in 2008. The Commission will also use its knowledge of the way councils approach the National Fraud Initiative to contribute to its understanding of their approach to dealing with benefit fraud. By bringing these elements together, we believe that we can provide better assurance for service users and tax payers at lower cost.
Going forward, there will be a focus on the perspective of service users and local citizens, and less emphasis on process. The new approach means that benefit services will be assessed against more challenging criteria. Practitioners familiar with BFI's approach will, understandably, see the new benefit inspection as a 'harder test'.
The scoring will be totally different to the existing method of scoring for CPA under the DWP performance standards. It follows our approach to other service inspections, and relies on an assessment against Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) with specific criteria for benefits. A copy of the final KLOE we will use for inspections from April 2008 is available for download here.
Indeed, it is possible that a council which received an Excellent (4 out of 4) rating for CPA annual assessments will receive a Fair (2 out of 4) rating using our inspection methodology. This will not necessarily mean that the service has deteriorated. It could reflect that the Commission is using more challenging criteria for assessment. We think the shift from measuring process to assessing outcomes is the right one.
Updated information on benefits inspection and our approach are available on our website at www.audit-commission.gov.uk
I hope you will find this information of interest. If you have any comments, please do not hesitate to contact Tim Savill, Benefit Policy Lead: t-savill@audit-commission.gov.uk
Yours sincerely
Steve Bundred
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