From fly-tipping to homelessness, LG Inform – the LGA’s free data benchmarking tool – can help councils compare and improve services.
Over the past two years, the importance of having access to data for decision-making has come to the fore. It’s likely there are now very few people in positions of responsibility who don’t recognise this.
From focusing on ‘data, not dates’ during the peak of the COVID-19 response, to understanding the likely settlement of people from Ukraine based on the location of those already in the UK, data has underpinned much of the public sector’s response to crises.
But data is also crucial for the day-to-day running of organisations, including for performance management and for understanding the context in which an organisation is working.
With their strong record of transparency, councils also use data to be open and accountable to their residents.
It’s against these last two purposes that the LGA developed LG Inform – our data benchmarking tool for councils and fire and rescue services.
Funded by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ grant to the LGA for sector-led improvement support, it brings data about local authorities – and contextual data about their local areas – together into one place.
This data would otherwise be scattered across the websites of multiple government departments and other organisations.
Moreover, it presents the data in user-friendly charts and graphs, rather than spreadsheets (see pie chart, below). All data items are regularly updated by the LGA, to keep the tool current with the latest publicly available data.
LG Inform makes it easy for councillors and officers to compare data about their own local authority with that of other similar councils. It identifies which councils perform the best (and the worst) against a range of performance metrics.
It is a one-stop shop for more than 10,000 pieces of information and, as an open tool, residents can use it, too.
We regularly produce themed LG Inform reports, enabling users to focus on a variety of topics in more depth.
We currently have more than 50 of these themed reports, on key statistics such as COVID-19 cases and deaths, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), children’s services, rates of homelessness, and fly-tipping.
These can be useful for: councillors who are portfolio holders or cabinet leads for a service – or who sit on a service committee – so they can monitor performance; those on a scrutiny committee who are examining a service in some detail; and frontline councillors who want to understand how their council is performing against key measures and to share that knowledge with their residents.
LG Inform has gone from strength to strength since its launch in 2011. In 2021, it was ‘highly commended’ in both the Civil Service’s Analysis in Government Awards and the Local Area Research & Intelligence Association (LARIA) Awards for local researchers and analysts.
Between April 2021 and March 2022, LG Inform received more than 927,000 page views.
If you haven’t used LG Inform yourself, or if you haven’t used it recently, it is well worth having a look and seeing how the data within it can support your work.
Everyone can access LG Inform at www.local.gov.uk/lginform and view its themed reports (where you can select your authority at the top of each report) at https://lginform.local.gov.uk/themed-reports