Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what role the Office of Local Government will play in examining council spending.

We are currently reviewing the role of Office for Local Government and we will announce the outcome shortly. Scrutiny of council spending is clearly important, and that is why we are committed to overhauling the broken local audit system we inherited.

We have already taken decisive action to help clear the significant backlog of unaudited accounts and will shortly set out longer-term plans to fix local audit.