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12.11.14

Doncaster council out of special measures

Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council has been ‘released’ from government control, the communities secretary has announced.

The local authority, which has been overseen by the DCLG since 2010, was taken over shortly after an Audit Commission report highlighted “serious failings” in its corporate governance.

It concluded: “The people of Doncaster are not well-served by their council.”

The DCLG’s intervention, which was due to end on 31 July 2015, has finished eight months ahead of schedule. Eric Pickles announced the withdrawal of government intervention from the council in a written statement to Parliament yesterday.

He said: “In June of this year, a Local Government Association Peer Challenge found that the council’s performance had materially improved, both politically and managerially, and that the council was no longer an outlier in terms of the performance expected of a local authority, except with regard to children’s services which have now been transferred to the Doncaster Children’s Services Trust.”

He announced the plan to transfer responsibility of children’s social care services to an independent trust in July, saying the intervention was to “deliver sustainable improvements in children’s social care in Doncaster, addressing the long-standing serious weaknesses in those services”.

(Image: ‘Doncaster Skyline’ by Harleyamber, licensed under Creative Commons)

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