Rebranding exercises are always suggestive – you only have to think about Windscale’s rebirth as Sellafield. Along similar lines, the Audit Commission looks to be trying to reposition the Comprehensive Area Assessment as oneplace (oneplace is onelowercaseword for this purpose.) For sure, oneplace certainly sounds less clunky than Comprehensive Area Assessment which reeks of clipboard and classroom. And there’s a certain logic in the name as CAA considers the broad spectrum of issues and performance in a locality rather than simply by organisation.
But then again, isn’t there something rather Orwellian about this piece of rebranding? The point of CAA is that it uses the same model to assess councils and their partners across the whole of England. It draws upon the same national indicator set and through the same key lines of enquiry it seeks the same kind of evidence of outcomes. The CAA is about consistency and uniformity because it is a national assessment tool. Rather than oneplace, wouldn’t ‘anyplace’ be more to the point?
[…] Rebranding the CAA « Town Hall Matters oneplace? 1. sounds like daft trendiness from a very untrendy organisation 2. clashes with Total Place and will cause confusion. (tags: totalplace oneplace caa auditcommission government inspection policy) […]
Dear John,
I’ve really enjoyed looking around your blog. I’m one of the folks delivering CAA covering North Yorkshire and York.
I’m blogging elsewhere about my experiences and it’s interesting to read the thoughts of others working in this area.
regards
Mike