The Government has been clear that reform of local audit is a priority, and those eagle-eyed readers of manifestos will have seen this commitment from the Labour Party to overhaul local audit even before the General Election. And overhaul perfectly captures the task at hand.

At its heart, local audit is a public good and does not lend itself to provision through pure market mechanisms. We now have sufficient proof of this hypothesis and the case for change. It is a decade since the changes introduced by the Local Audit and Accountability Act came into force and in that time, we have seen a significant decline in both the timeliness and impact of local audit.