Assessing local authorities

The Audit Commission is now responsible for assessing the overall performance of every council in England, through the new Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) initiative. The CPA improvement programme was launched in 2002 for unitary and county councils, and in 2003 for district and borough councils. It combines a council's own judgement of how it is performing with an external assessment of how well it is run as an organisation and how likely it is to improve.