“Councils are responsible for shaping their places and to do this effectively they need data about the activities and performance of the rest of the public sector (including central government) in their local authority area.
Responding to the launch of the Office for Local Government by the Secretary of State Michael Gove at the LGA’s Annual Conference, Cllr Shaun Davies, Chair of the LGA, said:
“Councils are responsible for shaping their places and to do this effectively they need data about the activities and performance of the rest of the public sector (including central government) in their local authority area. Therefore, the new Local Authority Data Explorer should include a wider set of metrics in future and not just those about council performance.
“Co-production with local government will be important in future iterations of the dashboard, to make it more meaningful locally, and we would urge government to deepen its engagement with councils to identify and define subsequent sets of metrics.
“There remains the need for clarity around how this platform fits together with dashboards proposed by the Department for Education and other work on indicators being undertaken by the Department for Health and Social Care.
“Local government has a very strong record of transparency. This includes our award-winning data tool, LG Inform, which is freely available to councils and the public and contains much of the existing data which is already collected and published.
“Councils continue to do incredible things every day to provide vital local services despite the huge financial pressures they are under, and a continued focus on supporting the vast majority of high-performing councils will be the best use of resources.”