Early each year I get a bill from my local council. It tells me how much council tax I’m going to have to pay in the next year and explains where the money goes.
I can go online if I want more detail. So I can see, for instance, that, at just over £1bn, children’s services are the biggest single budget item for my county council this year.
All very transparent. But what if I want to know how well my council is using that money? If I want to check whether my council is, let’s say, spending twice as much on waste collection as a similar-sized council somewhere else, there is no easy way to do it. In other words, I can see what my council spends, but it’s difficult to assess whether those services are good value for money.
For 32 years, until this March, it was less complicated. There was a central group of highly trained auditors in the Audit Commission whose job it was to check local authority books and rate their performance. The local government watchdog set clear, national minimum standards and provided a way to spot and tackle failure. There was also, briefly, a national set of local indicators to compare councils’ performance.
But the coalition government, directed by former communities secretary Eric Pickles, scrapped the commission and the national indicators, relying instead on councils to develop their own systems to improve services, and local people (or “armchair auditors”) to challenge underperformance.
Councils can still hire auditors – and many of the functions of the Audit Commission have been privatised – but the idea was also that councils themselves would help one another to improve, via organisations like the Local Government Association (LGA), which is led by politicians. So politicians were going to help each other improve, and then measure how well they’d done. What could possibly go wrong with that?
The LGA says that 74% of the indicators it uses to measure progress have seen improvement. Sounds great, right? But remember: these are politicians reporting on whether the indicators they set up themselves are working. They include, for instance, accountability and trust. You can’t use these indicators to see if your council is spending more than another council on emptying your bins.
So where might you go for some real measures of council performance?
Perhaps the snappily-titled index of multiple deprivation. This is a snapshot, published every five years by the Department for Communities and Local Government, of 326 local authority districts in England, ranked against seven measures of deprivation, including income, jobs, education and skills, health, crime and access to housing and public services.
This report is pounced on by councils as it is one of the few objective, comparative measures of what they do. It also – inconveniently for a government that still claims “we’re all in it together”– highlights the north/south gap: all five of the most deprived districts are in the north, while all five of those doing best are in the south-east.
What other figures are available to assess the quality of local government policies?
To be fair to the government, it has acknowledged the need for some concrete evidence about the effectiveness of public services, in both central and local government. It set up, in March 2013, a What Works network of seven centres and two separate bodies, one in Scotland and one in Wales, covering policy areas that collectively spend more than £200bn of public money.
The idea is to enable government officials to “make decisions based upon strong evidence of what works and to provide cost-efficient, useful services”. The network’s first report in November 2014 has some interesting examples of good evidence, such as the finding that “hot spot” policing - patrolling in small areas with high levels of crime – makes places safer without displacing crime. It also found that while major sporting and cultural projects may have intrinsic social value, their local economic impact tends “not to be large and is more often zero”.
There are also bodies such as the Centre for Public Scrutiny, a charity since 2010, which has a long-established track record in holding councils and other public services to account.
But trying to compare how well different councils work is fraught with difficulties, even for the experts. Take the government’s flagship social policy to “turn around” troubled families. In June, the prime minister claimed this programme had saved taxpayers £1.2bn and turned around the lives of 99% of the families involved. But detailed analysis by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, published in November, concluded that few of the claims made about the programme stand up to any form of scrutiny.
Full Fact has pointed out that the £1.2bn claim was based on a sample of families from just seven of the 152 local authorities taking part in the scheme. Most of the seven areas saved about £6,000-£10,000 per family, but Salford saved £18,000 per family while Staffordshire saved £49,000 per family in the first year of the programme. Those kind of differences, on just one programme, highlight just how difficult it is to compare what councils do with our money.
David Caplan, a former director at the Audit Commission, says that while there are still places to find data about council performance, including this central list of what government collects on local authorities, there is no longer any easy place to find all the relevant indicators for a specific council or area. Caplan says research in local authorities has been a victim of cuts and impact analysis is not hugely valued nor deemed useful in the current climate. “There is still data around but it’s harder to reach and aggregation is either partial or requires payment.”
Talk to us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic and sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday.
