If Eric Pickles accuses you of having lost your way, as he has apparently said of the soon-for-abolition Audit Committee, you're almost certainly doing the right things.

Like measuring added value, knowing what works and what doesn't and why. Providing independent commentary that almost everybody accepts to be honest and useful. Not perfect - since information never is - but honest and useful.

No. I mean, why would government want an Audit Commission anyway?

Friday. Good. Time for a round-up of some Things That Are Not Surprising.

Health Service Journal has compiled the available PCT world-class commissioning assurance scores into league tables (commendably, using two different methodologies for weighting scores).

And guess what? PCTs became better at passing the world-class commissioning tests. Wow! World-class decommissioning, however, seems to remain another matter altogether

The seminal parliamentary journalist Andrew Roth died this morning, at the age of 91.

Born in New York, he was a journalist and foreign correspondent around the world for 20 years. Moving to this country in 1950, Roth was political correspondent for the Manchester Evening News from 1972-1984, contributed to the New Statesman from 1984-1997, and has been an obituarist and contributor to The Guardian since 1996.

Editor's note - Monitor haven't put this online yet, so I am doing so very quickly. No time to make the tables readable, but there is some interesting text here. National 18 week waiting time target cancelled - except where specified in the contracts sticks out.

Review of NHS foundation trust annual plans 2010/11

Overview

The General Medical Council (GMC) has cleared sacked diabetes consultant Dr Shirine Boardman of any wrong-doing – two years after South Warwickshire Hospital NHS Trust sacked her in July 2008.

Dr Boardman did not transfer medical records to any external organisation, as South Warwickshire Hospital Trust claimed. There was no breach of patient confidentiality, no involvement whatsoever of any “company”, and Dr Boardman did not break any NHS rules.

This feature in The Independent's business section pronounces that "the other British success story in recent months is the pharmaceutical chemicals sectors, again largely linked to US trade. This sector contributed a respectable £221m extra, and the gain appears to be based on making pills and potions for US and Chinese customers from raw materials and semi-finished items sourced from China".

Channel 4 News has the story that Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell is heading for the exit.

The story reports that he had intended to quit directly after the election, but stayed on to facilitiate the handover of power to the Coalition Government.

That is a man who knows the burial location of many a corpse, metaphorically speaking. His book should be genuinely worth reading, if he chooses to write one.

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at re-reconfiguration (again)

We had a phase in our local NHS when cuts were feared, and we saw campaigns about keeping open facilities that were not going to be shut (just in case). There was even a hard-fought campaign preventing moving a GP surgery from old inaccessible premises a few hundred yards down the road to better, bigger, modern premises.

The excellent E-Health Insider website reveals that NHS Northamptonshire has ended its contract for commissioning support with UnitedHealth UK a year early, after two years.

The UnitedHealth UK contract was reported by NHS Nothamptonshire CE John Parkes to be the biggest commissioning support contract let under the DH Framework For Procuring External Support In Commissioning (FESC).

The cloudy future of Dr Foster Intelligence?
A Health Policy Insight exclusive

- Health Secretary bought the NHS Information Centre's share in Dr Foster Intelligence for £8 million on 9 July; yet no announcement was made
- The NHS Information Centre and DH's reporting of Dr Foster Intelligence share ownership is difficult to unpick
- Dr Foster Intelligence's £1.5 million operating profit for 2009 (half of which went back to the public sector) was less than 7% of DFI's £22.1 million revenue in that year