Regulation
One Plus: One Parent Families:A Report from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator under section 33 of the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005
Author: Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator
Date: 2008
This report has been produced by OSCR under section 33 of the 2005 Act. It presents the findings of an OSCR enquiry after the event, into the failure of the charity One Plus:One Parent Families and can be viewed on OSCR's website here.
The Crerar Review: The report of the independent review of regulation, audit, inspection and complaints handling of public services in Scotland.
Author: Professor Lorne Crerar
Date: October 2007
Commisioned By: The Scottish Governement
Over the past year Professor Lorne Crerar has been investigating how public service organisations are scrutinised.
Following on from this work Professor Crerar has written a report which includes a number of recommendations as to how audit, regulation and complaint handling could be improved.
Professor Crerar argues that while external regulators do have a role in scrutinising the work of organisations the primary responsibility for standards and performance lies with service providers. Therefore inspection should be based on self-assessment amongst service providers.
Professor Crerar suggests that regular cyclical inspection may not be necessary (except in the case of financial audit) and should only be done if no other option is satisfactory. Where cyclical inspections are necessary they whould take into account the needs of the public and all reports should be written in a way that is easily understood by the general population.
Professor Crerar is concerned at the number of regulatory bodies there are in Scotland and suggests that at times they duplicate each others work. He has a number of suggestions to combat this:
- A bench marking exercise should be carried out to assess the cost/benefit of different scrutiny bodies
- Regulatory bodies should work in a more strategic way and where there interests overlap one body should take a lead in scrutinising and then share that information with the other.
- Where the work of regulatory bodies often overlap consideration should be given to amalgamating the bodies.
- Existing scrutiny should be scaled back if new scrutiny is introduced and no new scrutiny body should be created unless it is replacing an old one.
Professor Crerar's long term proposal is that one single national scrutiny body could take on responsibility for scrutinising services in Scotland. The Scottish Government has received the report and is considering its content. Once the Scottish Government has had time to digest the content it will announce its response.
The Crerar Review limited the scope of its investigation to looking at external scrutiny bodies that inspect services such as the Care Commission and Social Work Inspection Agency. It did not look at the work of bodies that regulate professional workers such as the SSSC. Nor did it include aspects of contract compliance such as Supporting People service review. This means that the recommendations do not include any ideas about how scrutiny and monitoring from these bodies could be streamlined or worked in a more strategic way. However, the housing support sector did undertake a information gathering exercise for the Crerar Review and the results of this was submitted as evidence for Professor Crerar and his colleagues to consider.
The full copy of the Crerar Review: The report of the independent review of regulation, audit, inspection and complaints handling of public services in Scotland is available on the Scottish Government's website or from Blackwell's Bookshop, 53 South Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1YS telephone order line 0131 622 8283.
Reducing the Burden of Information Demands
on Registered Social Landlords
Author: Oatway Solutions and Jim Harvey Consulting
Date: July 2004
Commissioned by: Communities Scotland
Registered Social Landlords face increasing demands for statistical
and financial information from regulatory and statutory bodies. Supporting
People has added to this. Communities Scotland commissioned research
in March 2004 to look at this and to identify ways of rationalizing requests
and scope for sharing information between bodies.
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