One of the things about leading a hugely complex organisation delivering more than 160 services is that you can sometimes get an unwanted "surprise" about something that has been hidden away. Local authorities spend significant time and effort trying to maintain healthy self-awareness so that such things don't arise.  And of course we can always rely on a range of inspectorates to point things out to us.

But the cliché tells us that ‘we only know what we know', so asking for a second opinion can be a healthy test, and that was exactly the approach we took to our recent LGA Peer Challenge.