Five years after the Centre for Public Scrutiny (CfPS) first introduced the idea of local public accounts committees (PAC), events in national and local government have led us to dust down and reconsider the merits of the concept. We are now launching a discussion paper putting forward a refreshed version of the local PAC model. We think it's time may now have come.

Since the original concept was developed, the world has become more complex. Local policy-making, and a significant amount of delivery, is now defined by partnerships – some formal, some informal – between public sector bodies and between the public and private sectors.