EALING Council claimed a victory this week when a public spending watchdog overturned a poor scoring after a revised assessment.

The Audit Commission announced that it would amend the council's score of 'weak' given when it was graded in the commission's Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) last December. Ealing Council has now been upgraded to 'fair' after it disputed the findings through the CPA's disputed judgement process.

The conclusion of the process read: "Ealing's achievement score within its corporate assessment has been amended from two to three, meaning that its strengths outweigh its weaknesses.

"As a result the council's overall CPA score also increases, from weak to fair."

The new rating comes in the wake of Ealing Council's decision to challenge the first assessment in both the courts and through the CPA's disputed judgement procedure.

Ealing Council will now drop the legal challenge in light of the findings of the disputed judgement process.

Gillian Guy, chief executive of Ealing Council, said: "I am pleased that we were successful in getting the commission to conduct such a thorough review this was, after all, something we were willing to fight for."

Corporate assessments examine council performance against nine themes which are ambition, focus, prioritisation, capacity, performance management, achievement, investment, learning and future plans.

These are used to form a judgement on the council's proven capacity to improve.

The CPA's disputed judgement team decided to upgrade Ealing on the basis of further evidence presented by the council that demonstrated corporate achievement in the catagories looked at by the commission's inspectors last year.

Sir Andrew Foster, audit commission controller, said: "We have strived to make the CPA as fair and as balanced as possible. The careful consideration given to issues raised by Ealing are testament to that.

"The council's case was unique and we could not conclude the process for resolving disputes before scores were reported last year.

"The whole point of the CPA is to improve public services and it is now up to Ealing as with all other councils to prove that they can use the CPA positively as a tool to make their local services better."