I had the pleasure this week of briefing our senior leaders on the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) consultation on the funkily entitled statutory guide, Best value standards and intervention: a statutory guide for best value authorities.

The guidance helpfully outlines the characteristics of a Best Value authority and, rather more scarily, details the indicators of potential failure. My first thought, as you would expect, was to scan through the Best Value characteristics to make sure that they at least resonated with me, and they did.