Humiliation As H&F Council Accepts Audit Commission Report Dropping It From Four Score To A Three Score Authority

The date on the front page of the report reads August 2007 and yet it was only published last week. It's reasonable to ask why? The answer is that H&F Council have spent the last half year unsuccessfully arguing against the Audit Commission’s latest conclusions which detail how the borough has fallen from an elite 4 score to a second rated 3 score local authority.

Not that any member of the public would know. The result was met with a fresh wave of tax-payer-funded publicity trumpeting H&F Council’s previous overall rating - mostly achieved under the last Labour Administration.

This news follows on from the shock announcement that the Audit Commission has recently graded H&F Council’s housing management service as “poor” giving it only 1 star and assessing it as having “uncertain prospects for improvement”. That's one star more than the Housing Quality Network rated the service when it carried out a comprehensive assessment last summer and concluded that the service was only due a failing "zero" star rating. The Council has also recently met with the Audit Commission about this judgement which I understand it is tenaciously lobbying to have overturned.

Please email me here if you would like to see a copy of H&F Council’s latest Audit Commission Corporate Assessment Report. I’ll send it to you in PDF format by return.