It is easy to portray inspectorates as being bureaucrats weighing down the front line of our public services. Yet they are so often the first resort when things have gone badly wrong.
Somebody who should have been in prison is free to kill; or a vulnerable child has been neglected. Explanations are wanted. How could it have happened? Why were the shortcomings not spotted sooner? How should we stop it happening again?
The short answer is that there is no sphere of activity where the inspection process can guarantee that there is not a disaster waiting to happen. It can reduce but not eliminate the risk. The significant changes which have occurred over the past five years in arrangements for inspection of public services right across the board have recognised the inevitability of this.
In the case of my own inspectorate, we have moved away from the more traditional in-depth inspections of Crown Prosecution Service areas on a two-year cycle to shorter performance assessments, with full inspection being confined to those areas thought to represent a significant risk. So far, this approach has been successful.
A report in 2003 by the Office of Public Service Reform established 10 principles for inspection. Most importantly, they signalled a move away from cyclical inspections focusing on organisations and how well they complied with standards and procedures. Instead, the emphasis switched to outcomes and in particular the experience of service users, with inspection taking on a more thematic form and spanning the activities of a number of organisations.
To facilitate this approach a number of inspectorates were merged or, in the case of the criminal justice sector, structured arrangements were established to support collaborative working between inspectorates on issues which span the responsibilities of several organisations. For example, a report was published in May 2009 by three inspectorates examining the experiences of victims and witnesses across the criminal justice system. An even larger exercise, co-ordinated by schools inspectorate Ofsted, looked at work across all sectors, including criminal justice, in safeguarding children. The key feature of their activity was that it looked at the overall picture and not just a performance of individual organisations.
This approach has considerable merits but also limitations. Its attractiveness for inspectorates lies in the resources freed up from standard cyclical inspection work which can be deployed to the more holistic work looking at important themes, such as our recent study of the quality of advocacy in the criminal courts and the ongoing review we are conducting with other criminal justice inspectorates as to the efficacy of arrangements for the recovery of criminal assets.
I have to say that inspectors themselves find this type of work more rewarding and more interesting. It often has a major impact, leading to inter-departmental activity and influencing government policy – for example our work on rape. It also means that much of the frontline is spared the need to devote time and resources preparing for and undergoing routine inspections.
Inspectorates can concentrate on those whose track record suggests that they are weaker so that performance can be driven up. However, this puts a high premium on our ability to identify those areas where the risk is greatest. My own inspectorate does this through a risk model which takes as its starting point the findings of our overall performance assessments and updates them with a wide range of management's information. Although we believe they are sound, my annual report acknowledges that overall performance assessments are necessarily founded on a relatively narrow evidential base and tend to be dependent on quantitative with limited qualitative measures. Nonetheless they are clear to the public and generate a response and improvement.
Others take the same approach. For example, Anna Walker, chief executive of the Healthcare Commission (prior to its role being transferred to the Care Quality Commission) reflected on how it had created the environment in which, for the first time, the NHS had been held to account. She opined that perhaps the signal achievement was in the development of assessment methodologies and the tools deployed and the recognition that measurements were not static and need to develop over time. Such focusing of limited resources was successful in bringing to light the unsatisfactory situation which prevailed in the mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and resulted in a damming report.
Generally speaking, the new way of working for inspectorates makes them more effective but it requires a maturity which accepts that the move away from cyclical standard inspection methodology includes the risk that some of the problem areas will not be picked up. It will be interesting to see how well the more risk-based approach to inspection – often reflected in the regulatory field – can stand the test of time in a world where shortcomings of regulation or inspection is perceived to be behind or to have contributed to disturbing events such as the banking crisis or the death of Baby P.
Stephen Wooler is chief inspector of HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate
