Over the last ten years, central government has developed new and more sophisticated ways to scrutinise our public services. This has been valuable – it has spurred many schools, hospitals and councils to improve. But there are concerns that inspection has become too unwieldy and too complicated to do all that it should to foster improvement and inform the public.
OPSR led a Cabinet Office-Treasury review of inspection to bring customer focus to this work. The report of the review began a programme of work that has led to a Government statement of its policy on inspection and a strategy for its reform, which are already improving inspection's effectiveness and efficiency.
During 2005, responsibility for taking this work forward passed from OPSR to the Better Regulation Executive. Read more about the review and the reform programme on the Better Regulation Executive's web site:
> BRE Public Service Inspection [Better Regulation Executive website]