Adults' Social Services Inspections

As of November 2010, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) no longer assesses councils' adult social services performance, nor carries out inspections. Instead, performance management responsibility has been vested in councils themselves through a sector led improvement programme.

Sector-led improvement includes:-

• Peer reviews and challenge, under which we will be inspected by officers from other authorities and given support to improve.
• Local accounts-we will produce an annual report on our performance informed by service user representatives, with neighbouring authorities in the south east region providing oversight of each others' accounts.
• A system for collecting and collating data on outcomes  so that we can benchmark our performance against other councils and also to help service users judge our standards.
• CQC inspections will remain in place in the case of significant service failures or where sector-led intervention proves insufficient.

Although the model above has been in operation since 2010, it  is still being developed and is expected to be finalised in 2012-13 and rolled out in full from 2013-14 onwards.

Final Performance Report 2010

Before the afore mentioned annual inspections of social services ceased to exist in 2010, our final annual inspection was held. An inspection team from the Care Quality Commission visited Brighton & Hove in May 2010 to find out how well the council was delivering social care. To do this, the inspection team looked at how well Brighton & Hove was:

• Safeguarding adults whose circumstances made them vulnerable and

• Increasing choice and control for people with learning disabilities.

The inspection team reported that we were ‘Performing well’ in both areas. The full final Inspection Report of Brighton and Hove Adult Services 2010 [PDF 154kb] provides a detailed summary of how we are meeting outcomes and outlines recommendations on how we can improve performance.

Performance ratings for 2008-09

Our previous full annual performance assessment was held in November 2009.  The CQC’s judgement on how the Council was performing on the seven outcomes for people was performing excellent for three of the outcomes and performing well for four of the outcomes.  The report details many areas where CQC identified good practice and also areas for improvement in Social Care.

Record of performance assessment for 2008/09

More information about previous years performance and the Joint review of social services