Paul Snell, former director of social services at Nottingham Council, has been appointed as one of six business directors at the new Commission for Social Care Inspection when it gets up and running in April.
As head of inspection, regulation and review, he will be responsible for managing the inspectorate's relationships with councils and private and voluntary sector providers, and ensuring inspections are carried out competently.
He told Children Now that he wanted to see local relationship managers put in place to encourage councils and independent providers to work together more effectively.
"We will have the ability not just to focus on particular service areas or particular residential units, but to look across the providers of social care in an area," he said.
"We want to help both these sectors (council and independent) by working more closely together at a local level."
David Walden will be head of strategy, responsible for advising ministers and Parliament on social-care policy and performance. Walden is a career civil servant and was head of social-care policy at the Department of Health between 1999 and 2001.
He will produce an annual report for Parliament on the state of the social-care sector, and has said he wants to take a broad view of the remit.
"We don't want to be confined to just care homes," he said. "We will look at the whole provision, including the supply of foster carers."
He said he knew from his civil servant days that these reviews always "have a big impact on policy formation".
Walden added: "The response to the Laming report is going to be fundamental on the children's side. A lot of that was about basic good practice not happening. The commission needs to be a force for improvement."
In other appointments, Judith Thomas, the communications adviser on public services at 10 Downing Street, will be the commission's head of communications, user and public involvement.
Jonathan Phillips, the Social Services Inspectorate's regional director for Yorkshire and the Humber, has been appointed head of quality, performance and methods.
The new head of information and knowledge management will be Geraldine Macdonald, professor of social work at the University of Bristol.
And Hazel Parker-Brown will be head of corporate services. She currently holds the same position at the Department for Transport.
The new commission will combine the work of the present Social Services Inspectorate, the Audit Commission and the National Care Standards Commission. It has had shadow status from the start of the year, but will not start inspections until April.
